First phase covers 3,300 postgraduate trainees and 1,100 supervisors; nursing, pharmacy and MBBS students to follow.
LAHORE: The University of Health Sciences (UHS) has launched PRIME, a digital platform that will track the clinical training of medical and health trainees across Punjab and retire the handwritten logbooks that have long been used to certify their experience.
Provincial Health Minister Khawaja Salman Rafique inaugurated the portal at UHS on Friday.
PRIME will hold an electronic record of every training activity. Trainees’ practical skills, research progress and the performance of their supervisors will be monitored digitally, and each training institution will have its own dashboard, with UHS overseeing the whole system.
The aim is to judge doctors on what they can do, not just the degrees they hold. Practical competencies and clinical experience will be assessed alongside academic results.
“The objective of medical education is not merely to award degrees,” Rafique said, but to produce professionals who can make accurate clinical decisions, perform procedures and treat patients well.
UHS Vice-Chancellor Major General (retd) Professor Sohail Sabir said the first phase would cover 3,300 postgraduate trainees from 33 institutions and register 1,100 supervisors.
The second phase will add 33,875 students from 60 medical and dental colleges, and the third 31,734 students in nursing, pharmacy and allied health, bringing nearly 69,000 learners onto one platform.
UHS oversees undergraduate and postgraduate training at about 230 institutions, a system Rafique said needed proper monitoring, accurate data and regular assessment. Professor Asif Naveed, director of postgraduate studies, briefed guests on the portal.
Paper logbooks can be filled in after the fact and are hard to audit across hundreds of hospitals. A digital record lets regulators spot weak training sites and gives trainees a verifiable history when they apply for jobs or further training.
Rafique said the province, working with the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council, had added more than 700 MBBS and BDS seats, but that new colleges and hospitals needed well-trained doctors, nurses and technicians to match.
Vice-chancellors of King Edward Medical University, Fatima Jinnah Medical University, Faisalabad Medical University and Rawalpindi Medical University attended, along with former health minister Professor Javed Akram and heads of several teaching institutions. Several of these universities received new vice-chancellors in September.
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