Dear Sir
The United Kingdom has an annual intake of approximately 7500–8000 medical students (for both undergraduate and graduate medical courses). While every region of the UK has at least one medical school, the distribution of places across the regions is uneven with some regions having disproportionately more places.
In order to obtain data on the number of medical school places available in each UK medical school, I looked up the various medical school websites and where this data was unavailable on a particular medical school's website, I sourced this information from Wikipedia. I acknowledge that this simple method of sourcing information may not be completely accurate as information on the various UK medical school websites and on Wikipedia may not be up-to-date. However, I believe that the information obtained is a reasonable estimate of medical school places available, as places available do not change greatly from year to year in most medical schools.
Medical school places in the various UK medical schools (for both graduate and undergraduate courses) are as follows:
London: Bart's 339, Imperial 336, King's 360, St George's 273, UCL 330
South East: Brighton and Sussex 148, Oxford 180, Southampton 264
East: Cambridge 300, UEA 168
South West: Bristol 254, Peninsula 215
East Midlands: Leicester 247, Nottingham 339
West Midlands: Birmingham 412, Keele 140, Warwick 178
Yorkshire and the Humber: Hull York 140, Leeds 243, Sheffield 241
North West: Liverpool 300, Manchester 380
North East: Newcastle 352
Scotland: Aberdeen 175, Dundee 154, Edinburgh 218, Glasgow 241, St. Andrews 160
Wales: Cardiff 330, Swansea 70
Northern Ireland: Queen's 280
UK total: 7767
The data obtained shows that medical school places are unevenly distributed across the UK. London and Scotland which account for 12.5% and 8.4% of the UK population (Office of National Statistics Citation2010), respectively, have 21.1% and 12.2% of UK medical school places. Five English regions (South East, South West, East, Yorkshire and Humber, North West) have relatively few places, taking into account the size of their population.
There is a need for greater debate on whether publicly funded medical school places should be more evenly distributed across the different regions of the UK.
Reference
- Office of National Statistics. 2010. Statistical bulletin: Population estimates 2009. Available from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/pop0610.pdf.