Thoughts on Medical Degree Apprenticeship

I think you've made the mistake of thinking WP students are meant to be able to do medicine... - a WP student

Silly me, thinking the apprenticeship was about actually widening participation...

It's just another half-baked idea that the government can point to and say "Look we care about bridging the gap, we've introduced an apprenticeship!". Whilst simutaneously ignoring the wider issues at play, and likely disadvantaging those they say they're trying to help.

Yeah, I do agree that the geographical factor may be an issue, and that in general the student finance model is pretty dire for everyone at the moment. Although with the funding thing, I'd note apprentices at the start of their apprenticeships also tend to get paid very little (they're legally allowed to be paid less than minimum wage) so for those from low income backgrounds they still end up with very little to go on (if they were eligible for the max maintenance loan it'd only be about 50% more over the course of a year if they are being paid the minimum apprentice wage, and they don't get the potential ability to work part-time in term or do casual full time work out of term!).

So it still does pose an economic challenge for them, however it does frontload this to the beginning of the apprenticeship, as usually apprentice wages increase each year, whereas I think medical degrees it ends up in reverse (as in clinical years I gather it's a lot harder to maintain part-time work in term time, and the NHS bursary replacing SFE funding for those years seems pretty crap unless I've misunderstood how it works!). So I guess there might be a light at the end of the tunnel sooner rather than later for those on the apprenticeship - but I still think they'd have to go through the tunnel!

From experience (and looking at current schemes) most degree apprenticeships start around £18K which is national living wage, nowhere near the minimum Level 2 or 3 apprentices might see. It doesn't have to stay the same throughout the apprenticeship and often increases a fair bit annually depending on your performance review.

Don't get me wrong I'm not defending £18K as a liveable salary for an 18-year-old needing to move out on their own, but I feel like there's often a misconception that all apprentices start on £4 an hour...

The BMA weren't consulted on this and have had no input into the proposal, which rings alarm bells for me. It reminds me of when the government started announcing new Covid exam policies on the nine o'clock news without running them by any teachers first, so school staff went into panic mode trying to see if we could deliver what they were blithely promising. Then there were the new teacher training schemes like Troops to Teachers that no one in education believed would work, and that the government tried to bring in anyway. They failed. I don't trust initiatives to train more people in profession X unless they're actually led by people in profession X, i.e. people who know what's likely to work.

I think you've just hit the nail on the head with what's wrong with our entire government. People who haven't spent a day in the profession dictating how it should be run. It makes absolutely no sense to me, and IMO is one of the reasons so many sectors seem to be getting worse by the day.

To be fair I think healthcare professions are affected by this more than any other sector - because of the nature of the NHS being a state institution, it necessarily needs to be governed more or less directly by the state. Unfortunately this leads to lots of legislation being made by numpties who did PPE at Oxford while doing cocaine off Ghislaine Maxwell's stomach or something who have never worked in the healthcare sector at all!

In other fields like engineering there is a lot less direct influence by the government and it's more indirect safety related legislation etc...

Yeah for sure. I meant things that were determined by the government eg. healthcare, social care, education etc. I've always been of the opinion that the DHSC should be majority-run by previous healthcare/social care workers, the Department for education should be majority-run by ex-educators etc. However, as we all know, that is definitely not the case!

Yeah for sure. I meant things that were determined by the government eg. healthcare, social care, education etc. I've always been of the opinion that the DHSC should be majority-run by previous healthcare/social care workers, the Department for education should be majority-run by ex-educators etc. However, as we all know, that is definitely not the case!

Dang, are you sure you're not me under a different guise

I would hope that it's a pretty universal opinion, but I guess not!

As a lead in a government health organisation, I'd say it universal amongst health professionals I've encountered and 50% of civil servants- including directors, but not so much amongst the general public. Generally most voters don't care about who is who and tend to think every politician is a suitability qualified candidate (popularity != competence)

Really? I would've hoped the general public had a little more common sense but I guess my faith in people is too high!

https://www.hee.nhs.uk/news-blogs-events/news/new-medical-doctor-degree-apprenticeship-launched-delivering-more-representative-workforce-local

has anyone else read about this on medicine apprenticeships? It says 'People wanting to train as a doctor could achieve their degree by an apprenticeship route from September 2023' but i havent heard about this from anywhere else. The blogpost is from Health education england, part of the nhs

https://www.hee.nhs.uk/news-blogs-events/news/new-medical-doctor-degree-apprenticeship-launched-delivering-more-representative-workforce-local

has anyone else read about this on medicine apprenticeships? It says 'People wanting to train as a doctor could achieve their degree by an apprenticeship route from September 2023' but i havent heard about this from anywhere else. The blogpost is from Health education england, part of the nhs

Why else do you you think trump and brexit happened?