VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) and Ministry of Health (MoH) will allow the private Ha Noi University of Business and Technology to start recruiting students for its medical and pharmacy courses when the university has enough lecturers and sufficient facilities, MoET has announced.

The Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) and Ministry of Health (MoH) will allow the private Ha Noi University of Business and Technology to start recruiting students for its medical and pharmacy courses when the university has enough lecturers and sufficient facilities, MoET has announced. — Photo dantri.com.vn

Ha Noi University of Business and Technology is a private university founded in 1996 with courses mostly in business, technology and foreign languages.

That a private university specialised in non-medical training proposed starting a medicine and pharmacy course has raised concerns from the public about its quality.

The university currently has 56 lecturers for the medical course. Among these, 23 have doctorate degrees, 11 have master degrees and 22 are doctors.

It needs one more lecturer with a doctorate degree in obstetrics and six other lecturers specialising in image diagnosis, infection, mental health, parasites, immune pathophysiology and embryonic tissue respectively to teach these six subjects.

The university will be permitted to recruit students when one obstetric doctor, six lecturers for the six aforementioned subjects and one lecturer with a masters degree in testing and analysis and more facilities are available.

However, other factors including the working experience of lecturers should be taken into account, said former head of HCM City Medical and Pharmacy University's Medical course, Nguyen Sao Trung.

Experts' opinion

Requirements should not rely only on the quantity and qualification of lecturers, according to Trung.

Trung said lecturers with little experience shouldn't teach students.

In addition, while the admission score in medical schools including Ha Noi Medical University, HCM City's Medical University often ranges from 25 to 26 for three subjects of mathematics, biology and chemical, it is about 20 in a university of business and technology.

"The admission score of medical schools should be higher than others. The score of 20 is rather low. I think most students at this level couldn't enter medical schools and pursue this major", Trung said.

While education institutions are allowed to determine their own admission scores, a minimum level of admission score for some unique majors including medicine should be stipulated, said Standing Head of MoET's Higher Education Department Nguyen Thi Kim Phung.

Medical and pharmacy colleges would continue to use results from the national high school exam as in 2015 and MoET would release a minimum score to be considered for medical and pharmacy college enrollment, heads of medical pharmacy colleges proposed last week.

VNS