rural workforce

For a health and care project I’ve been spending lots of time looking at workforce data/stocktakes and the issues that affect workforce recruitment and retention in rural areas. Now the Department of Health has announced that it 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.

Alongside this, and of particular interest to RSN members, the Department has published the Government’s response to the consultation on expanding undergraduate medical education.

The response explicitly references rural in calling for the bidding criteria to ‘align expansion to local NHS workforce need with an emphasis on priority geographical areas, including rural and coastal areas’; (page 6); and highlights the challenges of recruiting to rural and coastal areas because of ‘distance to an urban centre’ (page 16).

This reflects a recent discussion I had with medical undergraduates – how can we increase the probability of newly qualified clinicians taking up and staying in a medical job in a rural area? Ivan and I are working on this now and have some ideas…