We are pleased to be your elected co-deputy chairs for finance for the BMA medical students committee.  

Medical student funding in England is unjust and unsupportive. The cost of living as a medical student has never been higher while the financial support for students remains inadequate. The BMA’s 2025 student survey found that a staggering 90% of students stated that their student finance combined with the NHS Bursary simply does not adequately cover living costs, with 43% of students considering leaving or pausing their course due to financial pressures. These financial burdens range beyond workload and basic needs, expanding into mental health, educational attainment and disparities, especially in widening participation students.  

Our plans for the upcoming year will be delivering the next phase of the existing finance campaign; the progress thus far has been positive but the struggles with finance persist. One of our main priorities will be working towards securing full maintenance funding for medical students in all years of study. Our voices are being heard, so now is the time to push this further and demand action to address these drops in funding.  

Our approach to achieving our goals this year involves you; we believe that students should be at the forefront of driving for the changes we all desire and ensure that you are involved during every step of the way. 

Alongside work with Government, Parliamentarians and other key stakeholders, this year we will be working towards a co-ordinated campaign within every medical school across England, in the form of student-led ‘Awareness Events’. By increasing local engagement and showcasing incomparable unity of students across the country, we will increase public and media awareness and highlight eagerness and unanimity on medical student finance disparities. 

We will also be releasing a comprehensive report on the issue, including detailed data and analysis from the 2025 finance survey we undertook, as well as evidence on how impactful the drop in financial support is for students. The report will provide further indisputable evidence to key stakeholders, parliament, the media and the public of the detrimental impacts of the crisis in medical student funding. 

The announcement of the new Lifelong Learning Entitlement, in September, has missed an open goal to fix student finances, deliberately excluding medical students from a full maintenance loan. It does however display the potential for parliament to reconsider current medical student funding and to act to deliver immediate and necessary changes. This has provided further motivation to us to ensure medical students are heard by the Government when they are making such sweeping changes to student funding arrangements, and that they act on these concerns to develop the right kind of changes that can positively impact medical students. 

We are currently working with ministers and government officials having met with Health Minster, Karin Smyth MP to discuss our priorities including widening participation and our key student loan ask. We will work tirelessly to ensure that those within parliament are acknowledging the failings of medical student funding.  Our next steps are to promote the  Early Day Motion which we worked with MPs to table. We hope that this will raise awareness of our concerns and gain the support of MPs across the House. We will also  continue to meet and brief a wide range of parliamentarians asking them to raise the issue of medical student finance both in parliament, and also directly with Ministers. 

We will join with other major stakeholders such as the Medicals School Council to build our evidence, launch awareness events throughout medical schools to show solidarity and bring these problems straight to the decision maker’s tables.  

We are engaging with NHSBSA (NHS Business Services Authority) to explore opportunities for medical students to gain access to the Learning Support Fund, a bursary accessed by allied health professional students, and are also working towards supporting them in digitalising the NHS Bursary system to promote speed and efficiency in the student’s claim process. We aim to establish student working groups that will allow for better collaboration and communication between the NHSBSA and medical students. 

We know that, for students, travel costs are often the biggest financial burden while studying medicine. We will be taking a closer look at these complex systems across our diverse collection of medical schools. By acquiring official guidelines and learning what works well, we will publish a guidance document containing examples of ‘good practice’.  

This document will be used by students to advocate within their own medical school by providing what works well across the UK. We will also continue to collate information on hidden costs such as stethoscopes, scrubs, question bank fees and resources provided by each medical school. This will help prospective medical students to make informed decisions about where they choose to study and further promote advocating for better standards throughout. We’re hopeful that a culture of sharing good practice will result in an uplift in standard across the UK. 

It is the joint hard work from us all that will magnify the medical student presence across the nation, and it will be the dedication from us all that will ensure success.   

If at any point you experience issues or need support, please get in touch with the BMA helpline service or reach out to your local MSC representative.  

Anusha Gajanan is a fourth-year graduate medical student at Sheffield University Medical School and Yalna Pouya is a second-year medical student at the University of Nottingham. Anusha and Yalna are your MSC deputy co-chairs for finance for the 2025-26 session.