Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will encourage medical schools to support the Royal College of Psychiatry Choose Psychiatry campaign; and what assessment he has made of workforce capacity to meet increased demand.

The 1,000 additional medical school places that will available from September 2019 will be allocated through a competitive bidding process that is being managed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Health Education England (HEE). The published criteria against which bids will be assessed include how proposals support specialities such as psychiatry. This is part of a historic expansion announced by my Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State in October 2016 and includes an additional 500 places allocated for September 2018 entry.

In ‘Stepping forward to 2020/21: A mental health workforce plan for England’, HEE sets out a plan to transform the mental health workforce, including a number of key actions to increase workforce supply. Current initiatives to improve recruitment into psychiatry training posts include increasing the number of training placements in psychiatry in the Foundation Programme and supporting the Royal College of Psychiatrists on its marketing campaign ‘Choose Psychiatry’.

From 2018 HEE will introduce an additional training pathway (run through Child and Adolescent Mental Health) to enable doctors to specialise in child and adolescent psychiatry.