Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt in his speech at the Conservative Party conference will outline plans for the NHS to end its over-reliance on overseas doctors once Britain leaves the EU. Hunt will set out to promise medical schools in the UK would be allowed to offer up to 1,500 extra training places a year, and released figures that said that one in four NHS doctors have been trained abroad.
Hunt will use the platform to stress that foreign-trained doctors do a “fantastic job”, and is expected to say that “we want EU nationals who are already here to be able to stay post-Brexit. Is it right to import doctors from poorer countries that need them while turning away bright home graduates desperate to study medicine?” NHS England is expected to reach the target in 2025. “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,” Hunt is expected to say.
The new plans will affect a quarter of the 110,000 foreign doctors in NHS England represented by 150 nationalities with India, Pakistan, Ireland and Greece providing half of the overseas doctors.
The Chairman of the British Medical Association’s governing council, Mark Porter said: “The government must tackle the root causes of this workforce crisis and the reasons why so many UK trained doctors are considering leaving the NHS.”
Doctors will be made to pay back the cost of their training if they leave the NHS too quickly as part of the plans. Under plans, newly qualified junior doctors would be tied to the NHS for four years and will be forced to repay the government’s contribution to the cost of medical school if they move abroad or enter private practice. It is estimated the cost of training a doctor to the taxpayer is £220,000.
