Universities UK is not the first sector body to analyse the sector impact of the NHS Workforce plan.
It’s long been clear that the doubling of places for student doctors (with 500 new places by 2025) and nurses – albeit with steady growth rather than a single allocation, and some tinkering around the edges on other modes of delivery – will have a huge impact on the universities that deliver them.
Equally clear has been the need for this expansion to be thoughtful and strategic, and to come with a parallel increase in the number of available NHS placements. Delivery of such expansion might mean new partnerships, and new approaches to teaching – these need to be carefully considered and scaled given the numbers and costs involved.
And simply pumping students and newly qualified professionals into a system that may not be set up to manage this would cause problems – the longer term increase in NHS salary costs, for instance, needs to be considered. The Institute for Fiscal Studies put the cost of salaries at around £50bn in today’s terms by 2026-27, on top of the £2.4bn already factored in for training new staff.
