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by physicsguy
1404 days ago
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The supply side limit is purely because the government chooses not to train sufficient staff. We have a government imposed cap to train 7500 doctors per year at University. Then when they finish, they do two years at FY1 and FY2 level, but there are not then sufficient places for all doctors to go onto a training programme. A friend of mine is applying for the January intake of anaesthetics this year for e.g. and there are something like 25 places in the entirety of the UK for that specialty. So people end up working as locums, working to fill gaps in rotas, which has a high hourly rate. Then, when they do finally manage to get a training place, they take a big pay cut and work more hours. That’s if we’re lucky - because plenty of them just go to Australia where the standard working week for a Dr is 40 hours, and many of them don’t bother coming back. But this is a problem created entirely by the government’s choices. We also have a hugely archaic system in the Royal Colleges. In no other profession do we expect people to sit regularly very expensive professional exams, and expect the staff to fund them out of their own salary rather than them being funded by their employer. £600 a go is not unheard of. |
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We do. And you know why. Because the NHS has no more capacity to train any more than that. In fact this last year it has struggled to do that because it was more interested in ensuring its staff had masks on properly than getting the job done. First year medical student placements in hospitals were the first to get the chop.
To train more people in any system, that system has to do less of what it is currently doing and more training. We can't afford that in the NHS, which is already struggling to meet demand.
Ultimately the problem is that we spent the seed cord in the 1990s, and we're struggling to replace it.