NHS England

Questions are being asked why the government is sticking to its cap on medical and dentistry places.
A shortage of doctors and other medical staff has been described as the biggest challenge facing the NHS.
But the number of places at UK medical schools are capped - in England this year there are 7,500 places.
England's Education Secretary James Cleverly told the BBC that you can't just "flick a switch" to increase the capacity to train more doctors.
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How much will university cost me?
Medicine is one of a handful of courses where numbers are limited by the government, because the cost is heavily subsidised.
In 2020 and 2021 the government lifted the cap on numbers, which last year led to more than 10,000 places being accepted.
But this year the cap in England is being reintroduced.
Library are with reading lounge, The Forum Exeter University, Exeter, United Kingdom, Architect: Wilkinson Eyre Architects, 2012.
From the BBC website…

Germanshepherdsmum

Surely we all know that hospitals and care homes use agency staff and that it’s very costly to do so. The agencies are not siphoning money from the NHS. It’s either agency staff or no staff - which would you prefer?

And they are not ‘privatised NHS agencies’.

The point I would like to be sure about- is who owns those agencies, and who is making very large sums of money by providing very expensive satff, taking a large cut along the way- to a system that has been brought down to its knees by a group of people- and the links to those now making the profits.

Get my drift? Same for PPE, Nightingale Hospital and all sorts of other procurement contracts.

If you can't see why this is VERY important ...

It stinks, and there is only one word, well several, for it

fraud and corruption.

Perhaps the heading should be amended as this situation applies to the whole of the UK?

who owns those agencies, and who is making very large sums of money
Some are registered in tax havens too.

Perhaps some are not and are reputable, providing a good service.

One of the reasons the agencies exist is the introduction of IR35. The rules are complicated so I won't go into them. The agencies that were used to employ the staff often insisted that the individual used an umbrella company. The individual was employed by the umbrella company who operated PAYE and more recently started to deduct pension contributions. They used rather devious ways of paying the individual so that the worker paid less tax. HMRC started to investigate this some years back and I know that they were looking at doctors.

The Tories are trying to turn the clock back to before 1947. Most people can't afford private treatment. In the olden days people had to pay unless they were lucky enough to receive charitable help from a GP or go to a local hospital set up by a municipal body. My grandfather had two fingers amputated in the 1930s on the kitchen table by a kindly GP after an industrial accident. We need a better NHS free at the point of delivery. The Tories cannot be trusted.

Sky News reports that Tory MP Simon Clarke is defiant after saying nurses using food banks 'should budget better'

Does he really think that qualified nurses who we trust with our lives to correctly administer medications, really do not know how to budget properly?

It's the incompetent Tory government that should budget better. What happened to the Brexit bus money that Johnson talked about?

From what I can find out, Cuba seems to have a different model for training doctors and nurses to ours plus the role of the gp is based in the community so that a personal relationship exists. Yearly check ups by the same gp are given.Notably there’s a very high number of doctors and nurses in the system. Cuba sends a large number of doctors to Third World countries but there are issues around the low salaries paid.
Obviously I have taken this information from the internet and if there’s any truth at all in this, perhaps we should ask Cuba for help until we have trained sufficient numbers ourselves?
I know it sounds bonkers but that’s how it is…..

Some English is spoken in Cuba but mainly Spanish so yes, probably not going to work! But maybe interesting to find out about how Cuba arranges its health care?

The graph produced by Fiona Bruce on Thursday's Question Time gives the lie to Tory claims about NHS funding. Here is the link.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bbc-question-time-health-spending-graph_uk_63c9cf22e4b0c2b49ad437a3

The graph is based on the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies' work.

It clearly shows the Tories and the LibDem/Tory coalition massively underfunded the NHS for the past 12 years compared with Labour's much higher level if support under Blair and Brown. The very last Tory year is of course pandemic money so doesn't reflect the annual Tory underfunding.

Quince, the Tory Minister on QT, could not justify the underfunding.

Grantanow As cooking Sunday lunch, I suddenly remembered the really good work Gordon Brown did for mental health.
I watched Question Time from Hoddesdon and was impressed with the question posed about the 53rd minute on mental health. Felt as if someone had been asking the right question at last. However the responses for me only reinforced all that is flawed with mental health systems here.