In the coming year, doctors will develop their skills at the University of Chester.
In the UK, the General Medical Council, which oversees doctor training in the country, has approved a new course at Chester Medical School. It will produce doctors for the benefit of Cheshire, Wirral, Shropshire and the surrounding areas.
The university will welcome the new medical students in September 2022.
Presently, the UK is experiencing a shortage of doctors, particularly in specialities including general practice, psychiatry, emergency medicine, and nursing home care.
There are fewer GPs per patient in the North of England than anywhere else in the country, with Cheshire having only 49 GPs per 100,000 (one GP for every 2,000 people).
Chester Medical School will play a critical role in training more medical students and doctors in the UK than in most other countries in Europe.
Currently, hospitals and GP surgeries rely on short-term interim staff to fill vacancies, and post Covid-19 waiting lists have increased, with more staff being required to decrease them.
A recent Chester Medical School stakeholder event underscored the need for Medical Education and Training following a pandemic.
The opinion of the president of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Andrew Goddard, is that the UK needs to increase the number of medical students to meet the demand for physicians.
During the meeting, Professor Simon, the chief executive of Warrington and Halton NHS Foundation Trust, spoke about the challenges of hiring and employing doctors in the region.
Chester Medical School (CMS) will have a substantial occupancy in the local community, aiming to train people to become doctors for the future, described by Professor John Alcolado, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences. He continued: “CMS aims to train people to work locally and stay in the community.
“We will be proud of our graduates’ kindness, competence, and scientific knowledge. To be fit for purpose, they must meet the expectations of the public and employers, be patient-centred, innovative, and use emerging technologies to the full extent possible.
“We will found the Medical School on the strong ethos and principles of the University of Chester, including community service, compassion, education, and training of healthcare practitioners.”
The doctoral programme at Chester will be a four-year graduate-entry course modelled after the highly successful Warwick Medical School programme, on which Chester has worked for several years.
Dean of Warwick Medical School, Professor Sudesh Kumar, remarked: “It is great to see this long-awaited partnership between the University of Chester and Warwick Medical School come to fruition.
“At this critical time when the public health sector has been facing some of the greatest challenges of our lifetime, communities are looking to highly qualified, dedicated, and caring doctors to enhance their health and wellness.”
