CHENNAI: Infrastructure can be built and faculty employed. But there is a shortage that medical colleges in Tamil Nadu are struggling to address — cadavers. As the number of medical colleges increases, so does the demand for cadavers, as medicos have cadaver-dissection as a part of their first-year syllabus.
According to sources, authorities here are addressing this shortage by unofficially seeking daily reports on the number of unclaimed bodies at the government hospitals. The next step, they added, was to streamline this through online reporting.
After the Resident Medical Officers (RMOs) of all government institutions were asked to prepare daily reports on unclaimed bodies, authorities have managed to give cadavers to their medical colleges and an extra 10 bodies to private facilities since February, said a source in the Health Department. These bodies are from non-medicolegal cases, which do not require preservation of the body for police investigation.
“All hospital managements have been instructed to embalm bodies immediately after death to preserve their quality so they may be given to colleges after the legal procedures are completed,” an officials told Express. Crediting this to daily reporting by RMOs, the sources added that the plan is to streamline the procedure by making online entries.
According to the norms laid down by the Medical Council of India, one cadaver should be provided for 10-15 medical students in an anatomy class. “Cadaver dissection is important for first-year medical students as they get to learn the locations of organs and every minute tissue. This would help them become good surgeons,” said Dr T Preethi, an anatomy professor at the Government Kilpauk Medical College Hospital, Chennai.
Medical colleges are dependent on unclaimed bodies as voluntary donations are few. “There are several cases where people admit patients and leave without informing the hospital — this is more common in the case of elderly patients,” explained the RMO of the hospital, Dr R Raj Kumar. There are also cases where the families donate a body as they cannot afford to transport it back home, he added.
However, several cases are unnecessarily categorised as medicolegal ones. “Caught in the procedural tangle, many cadavers are wasted, as a decayed body cannot be used to teach students,” said Dr R Selva Kumar, head of Forensic Medicine, KMCH.
For private medical colleges, three bodies each were provided by Government Mohan Kumaramangalam Medical College, Salem, Coimbatore Medical College, and Stanley Medical College Hospital, Chennai. Meanwhile, Madurai Medical College received one. This was apart from the ones provided to government institutions, sources said.
This, however, is not just a matter of health and education, but economics also. The shortage means the price of each cadaver has quadrupled. The government used to collect `25,000 for a cadaver given to a private medical college. But according to a Government Order issued in February, the price has been hiked to `1 lakh. “The amount will be used for the colleges’ expenses,” an official added.