Doctors warn of 'crisis' in medical training

Britain faces a desperate shortage of medical experts after major funding cuts hit universities, the British Medical Association warned today.

Patients will suffer as more doctors are trained by non-specialists, while medical breakthroughs become much less likely in future, the BMA said.

In a strongly-worded attack on the way university research funding is distributed, the BMA warned that the problem was turning into a "crisis". Professor Michael Rees, head of the BMA's medical academic committee, said specialisms such as anaesthetics, radiology and psychiatry were all in grave danger.

He said the Research Assessment Exercise, which rates university departments on their research output and is used to decide on future funding, was "biased" against medics.

"As medical schools cut back on posts to balance their books, we face the disappearance of certain specialities from medicine departments altogether," he said. "In radiology, for instance, departments have closed in medical schools in London, Liverpool and Leicester, and senior lecturers have been lost in Nottingham, Cardiff, Bristol and Edinburgh.

"This at a time when the NHS faces a desperate shortage of radiologists. All over the country lecturer posts have been lost, with a 36% reduction in total posts since 2000. "These posts are vital to train new clinical academics. Without them we are mortgaging our future. If action is not taken to reform the RAE, we will be plunged into a situation from which there is no return. And patients will suffer."

The BMA said the funding mechanism had seen the budgets of all but the highest-rated university departments slashed. In 1997 there were 12 academic departments of anaesthesia in London. Now there are only three.

In psychiatry, more than a quarter of all academic posts in the UK have been cut. The BMA argued that unlike other subjects, medical research is based much more on team and interdisciplinary working, which it said was "not properly recognised" by the RAE.