Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to increase the number of training hours that medicine students undertake on eating disorders.

Diagnosing and treating eating disorders is an important area of medical practice. It is included within the curriculum for training all doctors, including for general practitioners (where most eating disorders initially present) and in more depth within training for psychiatry, particularly child and adolescent psychiatrists.

Each individual medical school sets its own undergraduate medical curriculum. These have to meet the standards set by the General Medical Council (GMC), who then are responsible for approving curriculum against those standards.

The curricula for postgraduate specialty training is set by individual royal colleges to standards set by the GMC. The curricula for specialty training is currently being reviewed by the GMC and Health Education England (HEE) and their counterparts in the devolved administrations, which is expected to be completed by 2020/21. HEE is actively influencing the review to meet the requirements of the National Health Service