CUTTACK: SCB Medical College and Hospital will offer a three-year Doctorate of National Board (DrNB) degree course on Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology from the current academic session. The National Board of Examination has sanctioned two seats for the course after reviewing the infrastructure, faculty and patient strength at the hospital.
Students qualifying in the NEET-SS examination, tentatively scheduled to be held on November 13 and 14, will be eligible for admission to the course, informed Head of the Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology department Prof Bidyut Kumar Das.
SCB MCH is the first government medical college in eastern India to offer the DrNB degree course in Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology. The sanction of two seats for post-doctoral training can be said to have paved the way for availing DM course in Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology.
Prof Das who had started the unit of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology under the Medicine department in 2006, had got government sanction for creation of a separate Department of Rheumatology in 2011.
Subsequently, Dr Saumya Ranjan Tripathy joined the department as assistant professor in 2017, Dr Manoj Kumar Parida as assistant surgeon in 2019 and Dr Sarit Sekhar Pattnaik as assistant professor in
2020.
Currently, the Department of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology is one of the busiest super-specialty departments of SCB MCH and caters to around 50,000 outdoor and more than 2,000 indoor patients annually.