Lord Winston
Main Page: Lord Winston (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Bethell
My noble friend makes a good and fair point on return to service agreements. Service time for doctors was tested in 2017; the results were mixed and had a negative impact on the number of applications. However, on his point on female attendance for education, I do not recognise his numbers and I completely reject the idea that there might be too many women working in the NHS.
Lord Winston (Lab)
My Lords, I regret to say that one of the key issues is not being addressed by the Government. Increasingly, inevitably, medicine is becoming a very academic subject; academics at the highest level are now going into medicine. There is a major problem with those academics being attracted to research in the NHS. So many doctors are now looking for alternatives because they cannot do research within the NHS. That is a loss to the NHS and, I am afraid, a loss to medicine. We must do something about research in parallel with clinical treatment.