Royston Smith – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Royston Smith on 2016-03-22.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department plans to take after the new terms and conditions for doctors come into effect to encourage people to take up a career in medicine.

Ben Gummer

Medicine is an extremely popular career choice and we expect that to continue. In 2015, there were over 48,000 applications for pre-clinical medicine course of which over 5,000 people were accepted onto a place on this course.

The new contract for doctors in training will have a positive impact on the working life of doctors and on the training they receive. It will introduce stronger safeguards to ensure doctors are not required to work long, unsafe hours, enforced through contractual obligations on employers and external scrutiny of those hours by the Care Quality Commission and the independent Guardian of safe working hours.