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Over 200 additional medical school places will be available for the new academic year in 2024, accelerating a commitment in the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan published in June.
The Office for Students has begun the process of allocating these places and has offered places to new medical schools at Worcester Three Counties, Brunel and Chester, which do not currently have any publicly funded medical places, as well as offering more places to the University of Central Lancashire and Edge Hill medical schools.
The location of these schools will help ensure medical school places are available where they are most needed, including training much-needed additional doctors for the North West.
This comes in advance of the larger expansion across the country from 2025 onwards that will deliver the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan commitment to double medical school places by 2030 to 2031.
Medical school places will lead to more doctors in the future
Health and Social Care Secretary, Steve Barclay, said: “We’re turbocharging our plans to boost the number of people studying medicine at university which will lead to more doctors staffing our hospitals in the future.
“By setting the wheels in motion to begin delivering on the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan already, we can continue making progress cutting waiting lists and getting patients the care they need even faster.”
As part of the workforce plan, the government and NHS England will also work closely with medical schools and the General Medical Council (GMC) to move from 5- to 4-year undergraduate degree programmes and will pilot a medical internship programme for newly qualified doctors. This will shorten undergraduate training time and bring newly qualified doctors into the NHS workforce better prepared to deliver patient care.
Professor David Green CBE DL, the Vice Chancellor and Chief Executive of the University of Worcester, said: “We are delighted by the decision to allocate an initial 50 funded places for medical students from September 2024 to the Three Counties Medical School at the University of Worcester.
“In the years to come this will make such a positive difference to the people of the Three Counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire together with the Black Country borough of Dudley and Halesowen, all of whom live in such ‘under-doctored’ areas of the country. We would like to thank NHS England and all in government and Parliament who have contributed to this most positive decision.”
You can’t fill a leaky bucket without plugging holes in the bottom
The British Medical Association though said that with more than 10,800 doctor vacancies in England’s hospitals alone, these additional 205 places a year are a drop in the ocean.
It added that the health secretary is fooling no one if he thinks this is the answer to the NHS’s medical workforce crisis – while he simultaneously refuses to talk with the doctors we already have.
Dr Emma Runswick, BMA council deputy chair, said: “We desperately need to attract and recruit more doctors, but most crucially we need to keep the doctors working in the NHS right now, and to do that we need to ensure they’re valued appropriately. You can’t fill a leaky bucket without plugging holes in the bottom.
“Our message is clear, if the government is serious about fixing doctor shortages, it needs to get around the table and reverse the years of pay cuts they’ve imposed. Our door is open.”