Team Blitz India
MINISTERS have written a letter suggesting funding lesser number of places for trainee doctors in 2025-26 contrary to a long-term plan backed in June last year to expand the NHS workforce, according to a recent report.
The Observer reported on Sunday, February 25, quoting a leaked letter written jointly by health minister Andrew Stephenson and the minister for skills, apprenticeships and higher education, Robert Halfon, to the independent regulator the Office for Students that they will fund only 350 additional places for trainee doctors in 2025-26.
Last year, ministers backed a plan to expand the NHS workforce and pledged to “double medical school places by 2031 from 7,500 today to 15,000, with more medical school places in areas with the greatest shortages to level up training and help address geographic inequity”, said the report. Labour is also committed to raising the number of doctors to 15,000 by 2031, it added.
Meanwhile, there is reportedly 8,858 vacancies for doctors within the NHS in England. This comes when junior doctors began another round of strikes demanding higher pay and better working conditions.
On January 25, the British Medical Association (BMA) posted that in comparison to other nations, England has a very low proportion of doctors relative to the population. The average number of doctors per 1,000 people in OECD EU nations is 3.7, but England has just 2.9. Germany, by comparison, has 4.3, it said.
“England needs nearly 50,000 additional FTE doctors simply to put us on an equivalent standard with today’s OECD EU average of 3.7 doctors per 1,000 people,” according to BMS. “Excluding London, regions of the country with a large population also do not have a proportionate number of doctors: 3.5 million more people live in the Midlands than the North West, but they have 4,000 fewer doctors to treat them,” it added.
Commenting on the vacancies, the BMS stated that NHS “has long carried a stubbornly high number of unfilled vacancies, a problem that far predates the pandemic”.
