Question reference: S5W-34287
- Asked by: Lewis Macdonald, MSP for North East Scotland, Scottish Labour
- Date lodged: 23 December 2020
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Current status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 20 January 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government whether it has committed any specific resources to addressing the reported shortfall in the recruitment of consultant physicians in the North of Scotland NHS region.
Answer
In December 2019, we published the first Integrated National Health and Social Care Workforce Plan in the UK. Developed in partnership with COSLA, the Integrated Plan sets out how health and social care services will meet growing demand to ensure the right numbers of staff, with the right skills, across health and social care services.
The Integrated Plan, and the preceding National Health and Social Care Workforce Plan parts 1-3, included a number of commitments to increase the medical workforce supply. This includes having grown medical undergraduate intake by 22% over the course of this Parliament, alongside the provision of increased training places in a number of specialties in both lower and higher specialty training. A proportion of these specialty training posts will be based in the North of Scotland.
The Scottish Government has also provided funding for training posts which focus on supporting rural healthcare, including funding specifically to promote retention of physicians in remote and rural medicine. Equally, the Scottish Graduate Entry Medicine (ScotGEM) programme, a collaboration between the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews with learning delivered through the University of the Highlands and Islands, has specific learning focused on rural medicine and healthcare improvement.
In addition to encouraging those at the beginning of their medical career to consider practicing in more rural areas, the Scottish Government is also providing funding to the Scottish Clinical Collaborative. This is a joint project between the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Scottish Government to give experienced retired or semi-retired consultant surgeons, anaesthetists and other doctors the opportunity to work in rural general hospitals. The project will help ensure that vital expertise is not lost and will help to maintain our rural healthcare services.