UK plans to drop university requirement for doctors, nurses

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Wednesday unveiled a proposal to drop the university requirement for doctors and nurses, who will be allowed to “learn on the job”.

Currently, doctors must obtain an undergraduate degree to gain entry to medical school, which they must complete before becoming physicians.

But NHS Chief Executive Amanda Pritchard believes that dropping this requirement and allowing high school graduates to learn via apprenticeships will help the NHS fill its 124,000 vacancies.

“The NHS is looking to expand apprenticeship schemes over the coming years, offering a different route into the NHS, where students can earn while they learn instead of going through the university route,” Pritchard told students at Durham Johnston Comprehensive School in Durham Friday. “This radical new approach could see tens of thousands of school-leavers becoming doctors and nurses, or [working in] other key healthcare roles after being trained on the job, over the next 25 years.”

The decision to drop university requirements for medical professionals surpasses even the US, where an erosion of medical education is underway.

Nearly 30 medical schools across the US no longer require applicants to take the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), according to a list published last month by Inspira Advantage. The exams have been dropped as a requirement to encourage “diversity” based on the premise that non-White applicants are simply unable to perform as well as their White counterparts.

The MCAT exam is a standardized test developed and administered by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which itself grades medical schools based on their commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), an ideology which views humans according to skin color and genitalia. The AAMC takes a “holistic” approach to admissions which takes factors such as skin color into account rather than just scholastic or medical aptitude.

DEI is enforced at medical colleges by the AAMC’s accreditation arm, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), which makes DEI a requirement for accreditation. 

Many medical colleges now demand applicants pledge their commitment to DEI during the application process by asking pointed secondary (school-specific) questions.

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) last month published an academic paper suggesting that medical education at its core is racist. It added that medical schools must make racism a focus for medical students, which includes segregating them by race.

Medical schools should also address the “general antiracism curricula that is integrated into medical training” and how “anti-Black racism is endemic to the culture of medicine,” says the article.