"Doctors get paid to teach students"
Having seen a few comments in posts here stating the above, I thought it would be good to shed light onto the facts on medical education and finances.
Medical schools draw their income from fees, governmental subsidies, research grants, donations and partnership agreements with industry or other organisations.
Trusts have contracts with medical schools and get a set amount of money per student they host from the medical school. In exchange they are bound to provide the teaching they sign up to.
What this entails is up to the relevant medical school module/year leads who set the curricular learning goals. The MLA has provided a certain standardisation framework, however there is still a considerable degree of variation amongst medical schools in its implementation.
Within every department that hosts medical students, there is one designated consultant who acts as lead for undergraduate teaching. They are responsible for creating the students' timetable and ensuring delivery of the sessions and supervising the students (doing inductions and signing off end of placement forms) on the basis of the agreement with the relevant module leads as well as contributing to assessment (writing MCQs and OSCE stations).
The amount they would get equates to 4hrs/week = app £10k/year. Within these 4hrs they are expected to deal with all matters relevant to medical education, which is impossible to achieve.
They are therefore heavily reliant on help from colleagues and trainees, who do it out of goodwill, with the sole reward being certificates of acknowledgement that they can use in appraisals and specialty applications.
Some departments hire clinical teaching fellows, who have a full paid job dedicated to teaching with a day per week or fortnight of clinical activity for their own development and to be able to justify maintaining their GMC registration.
The above two are the only ones in the department who get paid to teach.
Which leads us to the big question. Where does all the money medical schools get go?
The answer is we don't know in full. In 2024, Dr David Hutchinson (a paediatrics registrar) and Dr Jonathan De Oliveira (a GP Registrar) conducted a study* which found that between 2000 and 2023, the UK government allocated £1.7 billion to NHS trusts specifically for frontline doctor training, of which £400 million have gone completely unaccounted, with some trusts publishing no accounts on the allocation of these funds.
In short, 95% of doctors whom you come across in placement do not get paid to teach you and have to fit it in alongside their clinical duties out of goodwill.