Doubling the number of doctors trained will make no health difference whatsoever in the UK if all 25 or 26-year-old doctors do, on completion of their training, decide that the NHS is offering them appalling working conditions meaning that they choose to move to Australia, Canada or New Zealand. Up to 80% are expected to leave this year, and Labour refuses to comment on a pay deal for them. That negates everything they say in this ad.
In addition, Labour does not seem to understand that GP training takes more than ten years in most cases, meaning it’s unlikely that their plans will deliver a single new GP until about 2035.
So we start training doctors when they’re 15 now, do we?
@Tim – the seeming discrepancy is because doctors may qualify at ~25 but then they do a few more years of training to become a GP.
I don’t know what training GPs get, but from the perspective of someone who can only get a telephone appointment 3 or more weeks in the future, it strikes me that it must be a training in how to do fuck all while sitting on the picket line complaining how difficult it is to live on over £100k per annum.
If 80% of doctors you are training are leaving the country then maybe some disincentives about being on the hook for training costs is needed or why not just outsource training NHS doctors to somewhere cheaper with a guarantee of a job and visa at the end of the course and then you can make a profit out of training doctors here for other countries if you really want to
If you want to be a doctor actually you better have that fully formed idea at age 15, and do everything in your power from then on to make it happen.
Stop doing GPs. It’s an outdated system from a time when people didn’t have mobility, so you had a generalist in the village. They’re wasteful in that so much of what they do is referral. “Hmmm… yes that’s not right”. Value added from that? Zero.
We all know where the problem is, so just have people turn up at the ENT or whatever section of the hospital and they check it over. Same as how you go to BMW to get your engine looked at, but Kwik-Fit for your tyres.
God knows how many medical hours are lost because of this nonsense. Plus having to do hospital work would turn a lot of women away from medicine, so we’d get more hours of work out of each trained person.
From a post earlier on this blog at some stage from the Reich, their system seems to work pretty well. Their (equivalent) GP system, from memory, appeared to be one where customers weren’t tied (Soviet style) to any one supplier. Hence, said suppliers were far more motivated to deliver a prompt and useful service to potential customers. Which then cascaded through their system.
We train them from kindergarten. 🙂 That is what the education system is for. To move people through a path to a career.
So start training at 4, doctors perfect their signatures at that point apparently and then through biology, etc. till they start specialised training.
Pity our education system isn’t up to much for schoolkids but further education appears so much better, well at the moment it does. While they are working at destroying that as well.
Brilliant point by Bloke on M4