Selection Charade

It is very sad that the current method of selection of resident doctors for post graduation is far from perfect. There is a common entrance test based on multiple choice questions. It does not assess how good a doctor the concerned person is. Based on the result of this test the doctors are admitted for post graduate courses. Their aptitude for the concerned subjects is not checked at all. I would like to give just one example of this deficiency. I had a resident doctor whose rank on the merit list of the entrance test was 28. This was quite good. Unfortunately this doctor was pretty dumb. There are many examples of her dumbness. I’ll tell you just one to give you an idea how dumb she was. I was assisting her to perform an abdominal hysterectomy, meaning surgical removal of the uterus by the abdominal approach. There were many large blood vessels feeding the large uterus. One of the vessels started bleeding furiously such that my surgical gown and the clothes underneath got soaked. I asked her to keep pressure on the bleeding blood vessel with a surgical mop while I went to change my gown and clothes. The pressure would stop the bleeding temporarily. I came back in less than three minutes. To my great horror I found that she was standing with a foolish grin on her face visible even through the surgical mask, pressing the mop on the top of the uterus (as during a caesarean section if one has to wait for something), far from the leading blood vessel. The vessel was spurting blood as furiously as before. There was another equally foolish resident doctor as the second assistant, also there owing to her high rank on the selection list. She was holding that tip of a suction cannula just above the spurting blood vessel so that all blood would get removed to a bottle kept at a distance keeping the surroundings clean. The bottle was a quarter full with precious blood that would not have been lost if they had compressed the bleeding vessel with a mop as I had asked them to do. I was aghast. I then took over the surgery and stopped the bleeding. Then I asked them the reason for such behavior. They had no explanation. The point is not to show how foolish and sometimes dangerous to the patients they were. The point is that there is a need for a better method for selecting candidates for postgraduate training.