Today Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt MP, confirmed plans for new medical school places in Eastern London. The announcement came as part of the country’s biggest ever expansion of the medical workforce which will also see the establishment of five brand new medical schools at Sunderland, Edge Hill, Anglia Ruskin, Lincoln and Canterbury Christ Church Universities to train the doctors of the future.
Medical schools across London competed for the new places, with Queen Mary University approaching me in November to request my support for a branch campus in the Outer East London region. Working with Prof Anthony Warrens, I endorsed Queen Mary’s application to the Higher Education Council for England (HEFCE) and Health Education England (HEE) on the basis that it would help address pressures on the local NHS from Havering’s growing population.
The Health Secretary’s plans will provide 32 new undergraduate medical education places at Queen Mary, the only medical school in the capital to have been awarded additional capacity. The move will allow the University to pursue a proposed project in East London to embed a branch medical school in the local community with a particular focus on primary care and mental health.
In the application, I advised, ‘East London is one of the fastest growing parts of the UK. The diversity of the population is increasing and we are seeing additional pressure on the health system from both a growing elderly population and a growing number of young families. While large parts of my constituency are affluent and stable, it nonetheless contains areas of deprivation with high levels of illness and healthcare outcomes that are worse than in many other parts of England.
Each of our GPs is looking after a much higher number of patients than elsewhere in the capital and a large percentage of them are close to retirement. The hospitals are consequently coming under pressure by those not being adequately served by the primary care system. However it is proving difficult to recruit young doctors and nurses, many of whom want to cut their teeth in Central London’s major hospitals.’
It is hoped that the establishment of a local base for medical education in Outer East London will increase the popularity of the environment for practitioners in both primary and secondary care. Queen Mary’s cutting-edge research in the East London Genes and Health project also has great potential to develop more personalised care and more sophisticated disease prevention.
Mr Hunt said, ‘As our society ages, as scientific breakthroughs create innovative new fields of medicine, and as our demands on the NHS increase, it is vital that our committed NHS workforce expands to keep pace. For too long, governments of all colours had trained too few doctors. Bright, eager applicants to medical schools were being turned away in their thousands while the NHS was left relying on unsustainable levels of immigration, often from developing countries that need their own doctors just as much.
Today we set out how this has been put right, including full details of 1,500 new medical school places and the creation of five brand new medical schools. Our NHS and social care system will be there to serve around one million more over 75s in a decade's time. This means not only does medical training have to expand, but how that education is delivered needs to adapt to the changing needs of patients. In particular, this means a greater emphasis on training more GPs.’
The expansion of medical training places is just one aspect of the Government’s commitment to the expansion and retention of our NHS workforce, having also announced 5,000 additional nurse training places every year from September 2018 and a new debt-free apprenticeship route into nursing.
I am so pleased that Queen Mary’s exciting bid got the green light. I hope this will prove a crucial moment in ensuring that Havering gets the doctors it needs both now and long into the future, and I have offered my continued assistance to Prof. Warren’s team in developing plans for a community campus.