Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)10 March 2021
I will start by thanking colleagues across the chamber and those who are joining us remotely for their very kind words, which are much appreciated.
Members have made a number of important points in this relatively short debate—it has been a short debate because we are in agreement about the importance of passing the bill—and I will address a couple of those points before I make some more.
Some 94 per cent of ScotGEM students have taken the bursary. One of the innovations of the ScotGEM programme is that testing out of the offer of a bursary in return for a commitment to work with the health service in Scotland, should the student graduate. That is a really important innovation, and it has proved to be effective and to work. For a future Government, it is an innovation to which great attention should be paid if we are serious not only about widening access to higher and further education and to healthcare but about attracting more individuals to healthcare.
I have taken note of the concern that was raised primarily by the University of Dundee—although the Aberdeenshire health and social care partnership raised it, too, to some extent—at the various stages of the bill’s consideration, as has been mentioned, about the possibility of additional medical school opportunities increasing the number of medical undergraduates and the impact that that might have on training, placements and so on.
The one thing that I would say about that—and I think we are all agreed on this—is that we need an increase in medical undergraduate places, and the Government has brought that into being. There is an argument that we will need more of those places just as we may need more training places for roles in other areas of healthcare, such as nurses, allied health professionals and so on. Actually, it does not matter where we put those. If we have more places, we will still have to work through issues around clinical placement opportunities and so on.