This week the first group of students at Ulster University’s graduate entry medical school, based at its Magee campus in Derry, will officially graduate as qualified doctors.

This is a major milestone for campaigners for a second medical school in Northern Ireland – of which the BMA was one – who were aiming to increase the number of new doctors qualifying in Northern Ireland.

Why was it important that a second medical school opened? To put it simply, Northern Ireland did not have enough doctors to treat a growing, aging population. Our waiting lists were the highest per head of population in the UK in 2021 when the school commenced teaching. The Department of Health’s own 2018 review into medical school places advised that the health service needed at least 100 more medical students a year to meet the increasing demand for healthcare.

Why was it important that the medical school be based in the west of the country?

Medical students are more likely to stay and work in the areas they study in, and the west of Northern Ireland has traditionally found it difficult to attract and retain doctors to work there. It has the lowest number of GP surgeries, with some of the largest patient lists, many of them single-handed practices covering large rural areas with poor transport networks. Some 18% of them have closed in the Western Health and Social care Trust area since 2014, according to the Department of Health’s figures, the highest out of all the country’s health trusts.

These closures happened either due to retirement or contract hand-backs from unsustainable workloads. In secondary care, the lack of hospital doctors employed by the Western Health and Social care Trust meant heavy reliance on locum medics to cover staffing gaps. The medical locum bill was described by one former health minister in 2016 during initial talks about opening a new medical school in the west as ‘eye-watering’.

It was also important for Derry that the medical school was based in Ulster University’s Magee campus in the city instead of its more populous campus in Belfast. Unusually for a medical school, it was central to a successful bid by Derry and Strabane District Council in 2019 for ‘City Deal’ status which triggered a multimillion-pound programme of economic investment in an area that has some of the highest levels of social deprivation in the UK, and has historically been the poorer relation to Belfast when it comes to economic and infrastructural funding decisions.

A health service that carries scars

The first group of students started their studies during the latter end of the COVID-19 pandemic. They now graduate into a health service that carries the scars from this: growing levels of burnout and moral distress among a workforce fire-fighting to deliver care in a system with waiting lists now 1.4 times higher than they were five years ago; years of below-inflation pay rises forcing doctors out on strike for the first time in the country’s history; and another historical first with the imposition of the GMS contract on our GPs.

The NHS is broken, but it is worth fighting for. The class of 2025 will be at the forefront of this fight.  

I said earlier that one of the main reasons Northern Ireland’s second medical school was located Derry was to encourage its students to stay and work in the west of the country. I have no doubt these new doctors will go on to have long rewarding careers in the health service wherever that may be, but as a proud Derry man and a GP who has served this area for over 40 years, I hope they consider the west as a place to have that career.

Dr Tom Black is former chair of the BMA’s Northern Ireland council and a GP based in Derry city