A HARLEY STREET doctor is setting up Britain’s first independent medical school since the start of the NHS to cater for the increasingly urgent need to train more doctors.

The Hunter School of Medicine will open in September next year on Brunel University’s Uxbridge campus and is aimed primarily at training senior NHS nurses and paramedics to become doctors.

The school, which is named after John and William Hunter, 18th-century surgeons and physicians from Glasgow, hopes to pioneer new ideas in the selection and training of doctors.

It is the brainchild of Paul MacLoughlin, former physician to Sir Angus Ogilvy, the late husband of Princess Alexandra. “We’re really just going back to a tried and tested formula,” Dr MacLoughlin told The Times, adding that all the London medical schools started pri-vately. “We just want to give senior nurses and paramedics who’ve done well a chance to go further. At the moment, these people don’t have much opportunity to do so.”

Britain currently has fewer doctors per head of population than any other country in Europe, and with the reduction in hospital hours, early retirement and the rise in women entering the profession, Dr MacLoughlin believes that state medical schools will be unable to meet the shortage.

All medical schools approved by the General Medical Council must be allied to a university.

By linking with Brunel University, which specialises in the sciences, the first intake of 30 to 40 students will be able to make use of the university’s spare capacity in pre-clinical subjects at little extra cost.

The students will make use of facilities at private practices and at full capacity should number 250 a year.

Instead of requiring several million pounds to set up the school, Dr MacLoughlin estimates that he needs to raise just £1 million to appoint a professor of anatomy and establish an anatomy department.

With a firm grounding in medicine, most students will be expected to take a fast-track course of four years and will be charged about £20,000 each year or the same rate as overseas students going to a state-funded medical school.

Bursaries, grants and scholarships are expected to be available.

The course will be more expensive but two years shorter than most undergraduate degrees, and will follow the GMC’s guidelines in Tomorrow’s Doctors and Good Medical Practice.

The board of trustees includes Sir Barry Jackson, President of the Royal Society of Medicine, Professor Bo Drasar, a former Dean of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and several senior professors and experts, including Galal Yousef, a consultant in clinical virology who is a Sudanese government minister. Professor Steven Schwartz, the vice-chancellor, said yesterday that he welcomed the opportunity to establish a medical school and that by making use of private facilities, including the London Clinic, it was the next step in public private partnerships and delivering better healthcare in Britain.

“There is a large network of excellent private hospitals, laboratories and clinics in this country. At present they are not involved in teaching. Yet they can make a valuable contribution to medical education and help to meet the demand for new doctors and other health professionals,” he said.

There are 29 medical schools in Britain and 7,350 students of medicine. All the courses for school-leavers and graduates are oversubscribed.

Two years ago Derek Wanless, a former chief executive of NatWest, produced a government-backed report forecasting that Britain could be short of 25,000 doctors in 20 years’ time, despite the extra medical school places already provided.

As a result Terence Kealey, the Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University and a trained doctor, is also hoping to establish an independent medical school. Dr Kealey has already appointed Karol Sikora, Professor of Cancer Medicine at Imperial College London’s School of Medicine, dean-elect. But the school will cost some £20 million to establish and take four years to build. Students will be charged about £20,000 and are expected to come mainly from overseas.

Dr Kealey’s aim is to recruit academics who put patients at the heart of their teaching.

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