Hansard

It gives me great pleasure to speak to the motion, and I will vote in favour of the bill. As members may know, I take a great interest in St Andrews—such a great interest that I sometimes wonder whether Willie Rennie thinks that I am planning an annexation.

My interest largely extends from the fact that I am a St Andrews graduate, but I am also the grandson of a St Andrews graduate. My grandmother graduated from St Andrews with an MBChB in 1945, having also been one of the first female presidents of the Bute Medical Society in St Andrews. What is all the more remarkable—if being a woman doctor in 1945 was not sufficiently significant—is that she did so having completed a modern languages degree at St Andrews by the age of 19. In some ways, the bill is correcting a historical anomaly; my grandmother could have benefited from it.

However, the wider point is that St Andrews has a long and well-established tradition of delivering medical education. Medicine was founded at St Andrews in 1897 by the Marquess of Bute, the then rector. It was only in 1967 that that was interrupted, but St Andrews continued to offer medical education by offering degrees that conferred a BSc in Medical Sciences, with students then going on to complete their medical training in Manchester.

In response to the concerns that some have raised that the bill may lead to competition, I would say that, in a sense, the current situation has led to medical graduates being lost from Scotland. With medical students starting their medical training in St Andrews and then moving to Manchester, we lose doctors, which we can ill afford to do. St Andrews has a long-established and largely continuous heritage in medical training.

St Andrews also has a reputation for innovation—the ScotGEM degree programme is an example of that. Helping people to change careers and move into medicine is a good idea. When people leave school, what they want to do is not always obvious to them; certainly, academic excellence at school is not necessarily the best indicator of who is suited to a career in medicine.

Moreover, we need more doctors, and not just in general practice. In Scotland, the number of doctors per capita is lower than it is in most other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. The average across the UK is 2.9 doctors per 1,000 people, and Scotland is slightly ahead of that figure. However, the average across the OECD is 3 per 1,000, and in Germany and Austria, it is approaching 5. Quite simply, we need more doctors, including GPs. Therefore, enabling St Andrews to train more doctors is undoubtedly a good thing and not something to be cautious about.

As I have said, St Andrews has established itself as a centre of innovation, not just historically but in more recent times. For such a small university, it has a number of innovations, such as the combined heat and power centre that it has established in Guardbridge, along with business incubators. The innovation that we see with the degree programme stands in that context.

We should be seeking to enable St Andrews to innovate more across all its subject areas, but in particular in medicine. The bill enables the university to continue to innovate in the future. It is clear that we must support the bill so that we can have more doctors entering the profession through more routes, and more flexible routes, and so that we can support the continued innovation in medicine and other subjects at the University of St Andrews.