A fixed cap on medical school places has resulted in hundreds of British students being denied the chance to train as doctors in the U.K. despite achieving the grades to do so. Meanwhile, foreign doctors continue to be welcomed into Britain to plug the skills shortage.
MailOnline reported that more than 1,550 prospective British doctors were refused a place at a U.K. medical school over the past five years, even though they secured three A* grades at A Level — the highest possible grade attainable in the exams.
It means that hundreds of British-born students who could be trained are missing out on the opportunity to do so while the government prioritizes immigration as an immediate solution, also contributing to the brain-drain of countries around the world.
The Department for Health and Social Care maintains a cap on the number of university medical degree places it funds, which is currently set at 7,500 per year after being increased from 6,000 between 2018 and 2020.
Despite announcing an extra 205 funded places for the new academic year in 2024, hundreds of U.K. students are being prevented from studying to become doctors and supplying the demand of an increasingly overburdened National Health Service (NHS).
The announced 240 places cap increase is a far cry from the recommendations of the Medical Schools Council and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which were accepted by the U.K. Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee back in 2022. They called for an increase in funded medical school places per year to 14,500.
However, the Department of Health and Social Care considers this a long-term ambition rather than an immediate necessity. Its spokesman told MailOnline: “Our NHS Long Term Workforce Plan will double the number of medical school places in England to 15,000 a year by 2031/32.”
Instead, the current supply of doctors is coming from overseas, a trend that appears set to continue with the General Medical Council (GMC) estimating in November last year that, by 2038, four in ten medics in Britain will have qualified overseas.
A report by Migration Watch U.K. revealed the extent to which foreign doctors were increasingly relied upon by the U.K. government. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of foreign doctors to join the health service doubled from 6,222 to 12,148, while the number of British medical trainees only increased by 17 percent.
However, the U.K.’s dependence on foreign doctors has increased even since then, according to a GMC report published in November, which stated that of the 23,838 medics to join the U.K. register last year, just 8,921 were trained in Britain. Even fewer of those would have been U.K. nationals.
A total of 12,503 foreign doctors came from non-EU nations, with India (2,402), Pakistan (2,372), and Nigeria (1,616) being the most common countries of origin. Non-EU-trained doctors have sky-rocketed in the past decade, with just 2,596 joining the U.K. register in 2012.
This has been a long-term concern for those running Britain’s healthcare provider, including NHS England’s executive director Amanda Pritchard, who warned last year that “excellent” British candidates were being turned away due to a lack of places.
“There’s no lack of demand. We are seeing universities having to turn away excellent people, not just for medical degrees but nursing and therapy.
“Obviously, you’re also looking at the ability of universities to ramp up the training places and of the NHS to make sure we’ve got the right clinical places, but over the next few years we would want to be in a position where we were increasingly able to be self-reliant on a workforce that would meet demand.”
