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Comment by brippalcharrid | Hacker News Reader

The British Medical Association is in a position to veto changes to the number of medical students being educated in the UK, as its members have a monopoly on providing medical training, which is why they hold votes on such things at their conferences:

https://www.proquest.com/openview/b0c6c69bed2854a96acfd2889d...

Matters like this are normally discussed behind closed doors, and there is plenty of horse-trading, with favours being negotiated, and assurances, and understandings that are reached before major changes are "unilaterally" "announced" by the Government. There are different factions within the medical profession, and none of them want to lose out when there are changes. Priced into the government's announcement they they are going to train more doctors, therefore, are a range of promises and commitments to the medical profession to make sure that this will proceed without incident.

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Interesting, thanks for that. Do you know if that only happened the once? I can’t find references to another vote like it.

From what I can see elsewhere, the tone seems to have changed slightly since then?

> “We welcome the news that there will be extra funding for medical school places as this desperate need for more doctors in training is a recommendation that we made in our Medical Staffing in England report, which we issued last month.“

> “However, this increase in student places must not come at the expense of extra funding for the existing workforce or reductions in funding in future years, because tackling the waiting lists and backlog are going to require sustained investment over many years. And the government must make clear that there will be sufficient clinical placements for all those who succeed at medical school.

https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/bma-says-increased-m...

A generous take on it seems that the BMA don’t want to make things worse for existing doctors.

I suppose if the government funded the NHS more, ensured that existing doctors wouldn’t be worse off, one would hope that the BMA would be fully supportive of training new doctors?

I suspect that this was one of the first years that reports from that conference were made available in a digital format, and that the way that issues like this have been dealt with subsequently has taken into account the likely impact of similar documents coming to wider public attention. I don't think it's something that people have stopped talking about in their professional circles, and I imagine senior figures would be able to tell ministers exactly what people think and what would happen.

Part of the difference is probably that the 2021 article is a press release aimed at the public, rather than an internal discussion that lead to a vote. With enough money I imagine you could make everyone happy, and doctors' standard of living is at just as much risk of being inflated away as anyone else's, so it's no surprise that the professional body would support training more doctors subject to guaranteed funding including for medical educators and clinical placements (all of which will have a direct impact on their members' salaries, bonuses and allowances). How exactly that will work out, and how's it's going to play to the public, we'll have to wait and see.

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