In the news: our report on the state of medical education and practice 2016

Last week we published this year’s report on the state of medical education and practice in the UK – you might have seen it on the news. One of the key messages of the report is that although the international standing of British medicine and medical education is still among the best, there is a ‘state of unease within the medical profession’, which risks affecting patients as well as doctors.

In the overview of this report [PDF], our Chair, Terence Stephenson, set out a number of areas where the GMC can help. Number one on the list is to work with doctors in training and their organisations – such as the BMA, employers, education providers, royal colleges – to come up with an action plan to reform the way education and training are organised so that they match your needs.

We actually kicked off part of this project on 20 October when we hosted a roundtable with doctors, educators and royal colleges to discuss how we can work together to make doctors’ training more flexible.

Another key piece of work for us is to engage with you and others in the sector on what professionalism means for doctors in the 21st century. Over the past year, we ran a series of events across the UK on this topic and we’ll be launching our report on this at our annual conference on 6 December 2016.

You can register to attend the conference here or get involved in the discussion ahead of time on the dedicated microsite, Good doctors.

While there’s a whole chapter [PDF] on medical students and doctors in training in the report, you might find our data on recruitment into specialties [PDF] interesting as you progress through your careers.

For example, did you know…?

• Between 2011-15, the number of doctors in emergency medicine grew by 22% while those in public health decreased by 15%

• Half of pathologists are aged 50 years or over, closely followed by obstetrics and gynaecology (47%) and surgery (44%)

• The proportion of obstetricians and gynaecologists who are non-UK graduates has risen from 52% to 56% from 2011-15 – it’s the specialty that most heavily relies on doctors who studied outside the UK

I’d recommend this blog post by Kirk Summerwill, the project manager of this report, to find out how we put it together and why.

If you’ve got any other questions or if there’s any data you’d like me to see if I can dig out, let me know and I’ll see what I can do!

Cheers,
Tanita

That is really quite interesting. Do you have any stats on general practice? My experience (from my limited exposure in my locality) is that there are a lot of GPs who are within 10 years of retirement and that the number of people training. Is that the case?

I am about to start work but will have a browse of the report later.