Negative publicity causes decline in medical school applications, figures reveal

GP leaders have voiced that the dip in figures are ‘too large to be due to chance’ and that some school students are being put off applying because of the ‘negative publicity’ around cuts in NHS funding, increasing workloads and the threat of a seven-day-service, including the expected changes to GPs and consultants’ contracts.

The new figures have arisen as there continues to be a shortfall in the number of GP training places being filled. Despite an apparent recent upturn in applications, data shows that in some areas of the country, half of places remain vacant.

Statistics published by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) found that there were 14,820 applicants by the end of the October deadline in 2015, 3 per cent fewer than the 15,220 applicants in 2014 and 13.5 per cent less than the 17,140 in 2013.

UCAS have claimed the reduction is due to a significant fall in students reapplying for medicine, which has fallen by 18 per cent, while new applicants were up by two per cent.

Professor Azeem Majeed, professor of primary care at Imperial College London, said the decline could be down to ‘negative publicity’.

He added: “The negative publicity we have seen about the NHS in the last few years – problems with funding, workload, seven-day working, consultant and GP contracts, etc – has started to discourage some people from applying”.

Dr Alex Harding, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, said the drop ’reflects what gifted sixth formers are thinking about medicine as a career’.  

He continued: “I don’t think we need to look too far behind – or in front of us to see the forces shaping their perceptions.” However, Harding added the figures may have a ‘silver lining’ if a fall in applicants reduced medical schools placing ‘excessive reliance on increasingly extreme exam scores as a way of selecting future physicians’.

Co-chair of the BMA medical students committee Charlie Bell said: “Students are being asked to take on ever-larger amounts of debt.

“A first-year medical student in England can now expect to accumulate debts in the region of £70,000 by the end of their studies.

“I expect that, these financial considerations, coupled with major changes to the NHS, uncertainty over the future of the health service and the treatment of frontline staff have combined to make medicine a less attractive option for some of our best and brightest schools leavers.”

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