Hunt aims for fully home grown doctor workforce

Expanding the number of medical student places by 25%, announced by England’s health secretary at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham on Tuesday 4 October, will take at least a decade to have an effect in the NHS, doctors’ leaders have warned.

In his speech Jeremy Hunt announced that “from September 2018 we will train up to 1500 more doctors every year” in England in a bid to expand the number of home grown doctors and to replace doctors recruited from overseas, who currently make up 25% of the medical workforce. “Of course, it will take a number of years before those doctors qualify, but by the end of the next parliament we will make the NHS self sufficient in doctors,” he said.

The number of medical school places fell by 2% in 2013 and currently stands at 6000 a year. Doctors’ leaders have welcomed the planned rise in …