Tories are expanding undergraduate medical education by 1,500 places. How long does it take to train a doctor?
Health professionals: You can tell this is a promotional picture for the Tory government’s press release, can’t you?
Currently doctors in the UK may train for up to 16 years before qualifying. 5 years for their degree (or six if you intercalate and take a useful subject like, say, History of Medicine), 2 years for a post-graduate foundation course, and then 3 to 8 years in specialist training.
So those who start their courses in 2018 may begin to see patients as soon as 2024 – or as late as 2034.
Either way, they won’t be useful to patients until long after most, if not all, of the NHS in England has disappeared into the grubby hands of private profit-making businesses.
They will be absolutely useless in coping with the current crisis in the English NHS that has been created entirely by the minority Conservative government.
As for the 10,000 places being offered for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals – how many of those will be taken up? The Tories have made healthcare one of the least attractive professions in the UK.
It’s years past time they owned up to what they have been doing and made a positive difference – by resigning and allowing a Labour government to rectify their blunders.
Here‘s the announcement, for what it’s worth:
The department has published the government response to the recent consultation on expanding undergraduate medical education.
The government will increase the number of student places at medical schools in England by 1,500.
From next year, existing medical schools will be able to offer an extra 500 places to future doctors. Another 1,000 places will be allocated across the country, based on an open bidding process.
The bidding process will be supervised by Health Education England and the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
The extra places will be targeted at under-represented social groups such as lower income students, as well as regions that usually struggle to attract trainee medics.
The government has also pledged to ensure the places are allocated to medical schools who will work closely with their local communities to help talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds become doctors.
Alongside the plans to train 1,500 more medical students, the government will also fund 10,000 additional training places for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals. Some of these places will be available to students next month.
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Too little, too late. They’re only doing it with one eye on the next election so they can spin it.
As these are so vital staff appointments just hope they reinstate the bursary for the nurses training and make the doctors training more lucrative to them wanting to stay the course. Unfortunately one could also read into this rather sudden pro-active move that this recruitment and training drive is more about ensuring they have the staff available for when they privatise the NHS. They are already moving to privatise the professional staff of the NHS under a privatisation company/agency.
bring back the days of matron, when government took a back seat more. (we never heard anything from them as student/pupil /staff nurses or sisters. not to say they werent around. funding had to come from somewhere but there never seemed to be the interference from the gov as there is now) matron had the last say in the running of the place.or so it seemed to me.
You are not supposed to notice actual facts or that by the time a doctor who starts training today qualifies a lot more will have retired.