The British Medical Association (BMA) has accused the Department
of Health of a lack of transparency over how it spends money set
aside for medical education programmes for student doctors.
Hospitals which conduct medical education programmes presently
attain additional funding through the SIFT mechanism (Service
Increment for Teaching).
The BMA used the Freedom of Information Act and had its Medical
Academic Staff Committee ask 33 teaching hospitals in England to
account in detail SIFT expenditure over the last five years.
Of the 23 that responded, ten were unable to account for how their
SIFT funding had been spent. Some reported that SIFT funding was
swallowed up by the trust's overall budget and was not recorded
seperately. Few trusts had strict auditing structures to track the
spend of SIFT funding.
The BMA said it was concerned that SIFT funding is being used to
pay for deficits at the end of the fiscal year and is calling for
the money for medical education to be protected, as well as system
to be put in place to account for the spending.
Professor Michael Rees, chairman of the BMA Medical Academic Staff
Committee, said in a statement: "Medical students represent the
future of the NHS. It is highly worrying that trusts appear to be
raiding money intended for education in order to get out of
financial difficulty. The need for decent funding has become even
more important in recent years, in which numbers of medical
students have grown, and numbers of academic staff to teach them
have fallen."
Emily Rigby, chair of the BMA Medical Students Committee, added:
"Unless it is strictly ringfenced, money that's supposed to be
spent on educating the next generation of doctors will disappear
into the NHS melting pot. Trusts need to be far more
accountable."
The full BMA report can be accessed by clicking on the following
link: http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/SIFTfunding
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