LAHORE – The Higher Education Commission has ranked University of Health Sciences number one public sector medical university with overall 8th position amongst 136 public and private sector universities of the country.
In the first-ever national academic ranking of the universities that was made public by the HEC on Thursday, UHS is ranked second in the category of medical and health sciences higher education institutions, Agha Khan University Karachi-a private sector institution- being the first. UHS is now one of the top 10 universities of Pakistan with Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad at first and Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) at 10th position.
The other universities in the category included Dow University of Health Sciences Karachi, King Edward Medical University Lahore, Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences Jamshoro, Khyber Medical University Peshawar, Baqai Medical University Karachi, Ziauddin Medical University Karachi, Peoples University of Medical and Health Sciences for Women Nawabshah, and Shaheed Mohtarma Banazir Bhutto Medical University Larkana.
The ranking model has been developed by HEC’s Quality Assurance Committee through extensive stakeholder participation, tailoring the process according to the ground realities of the higher education sector in Pakistan. Various leading international ranking practices and systems have also been analysed while devising the methodology for this ranking.
The ranking is based on the number of students, research productivity and quality, innovation and knowledge transfer, infrastructure, annual graduate output, international collaborations, student satisfaction and financial health of the institution.
The basic objective of the rankings is to enhance international competition of universities in order to create attractive educational multi-cultural environments and the trend towards university collaboration and most importantly the opportunity to improve and eliminate institutional weaknesses.
According to the statistical analysis done by HEC, UHS has 519 postgraduate and 15,620 undergraduate students enrolled and 39,562 registered students. The university has 187 research publications to its credit in high impact international journals during last 5 years. Last year only, the work done by its researchers has been cited in 62 international articles.
Overall student satisfaction rate with regards to teaching and facilities has been calculated as 88 per cent. University spends more than 10 per cent of its annual budget on research and innovation. It has developed very fruitful international research collaborations with 13 foreign universities and 18 of its students are doing PhD in top universities of the world. It has produced 8 PhDs and 241 MPhils in last 5 years.