HYDERABAD: With the Telangana health department all set to introduce biometric attendance system in medical colleges and hospitals to track unavailability of staff from the ensuing academic year, the board of governors at MCI have also decided that all medical colleges will have to regularly record attendance of all faculty members and doctors. They will also have to make the attendance data available on their respective websites under a designated section on a daily basis. The move comes after doctors claimed that many colleges replace names of senior or retired professors on permanent payrolls with a guest faculty. “While the payrolls indicate a permanent faculty member, the classes are mostly taken by guest faculty members,” said a correspondent of a private medical college. “The attendance shall be made available on college website in the form of daily attendance dashboard. The council may seek from the medical colleges/institutions the record of the staff’s attendance during or after assessment,” read a gazette issued by the MCI.
The health department further decided to install biometric attendance systems in primary health centres and community health centres to check unavailability of doctors and other medical personnel. As per current practice, manual attendance of faculty members is verified by MCI’s inspection team. It is a common practice among some private medical colleges of appointing one-day faculty only on days when MCI team visits. The health department decided to introduce biometric system following high absenteeism among doctors and other staff members at PHCs and CHCs.
According to a review held by the health department recently, it was found that in some areas, attendance of doctors and nurses was less than 20%. So, biometric system will be installed to check on doctors skipping duties.