1 in 5 UK medical students consider quitting school, survey finds

Some one in five UK medical students said they were considering dropping out of university, according to a new survey that found many students were suffering from poor mental health.

Medical students at nine institutions in the country responded to online survey questions between November 2020 and February 2021 and then to a follow-up survey between February and May 2021.

Nearly 800 students responded to the initial questionnaire and around 407 completed the follow-up survey which included questions about their intention to leave school and their mental health.

More than half had insomnia, over a third were emotionally exhausted, and four in 10 had symptoms of anxiety or depression, the survey found.

The results were published on Tuesday in the scientific journal BMJ Open and funded by the British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors and medical students’ trade union.

‘Worrying findings’

“These worrying findings line up with what we hear from our fellow medical students every day,” Ria Bansal and Akshata Valsangkar, welfare deputy chairs of the BMA medical students committee, said in a statement reacting to the new survey. 

“No one should feel so stressed, and under such great pressure from studying to be a doctor that they experience serious symptoms of poor mental health”.

A BMA survey of more than 3,500 medical students published earlier this month found that more than 40 per cent had considered pausing their schooling or leaving medicine due to financial pressures.

“These astonishing and unmanageable pressures that we’re putting medical students under are completely unnecessary,” Bansal and Valsangkar added in the statement.

The new survey this week also found that six in 10 medical students were drinking hazardously and more than half had symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

In most cases, those students reporting poor mental health symptoms such as insomnia were more likely to say they intended to leave school.

“The findings of this study suggest that medical students’ mental health is an important contributor to students dropping out and reinforces the importance of supporting students at medical school,” wrote the study authors from University College London in the UK and Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

The study also sheds “some light on which students are more likely to struggle and particularly need medical schools’ support to successfully make it through their curriculum,” Milou Silkens, an assistant professor at the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management and one of the study’s authors, told Euronews Health in an email.

“Medical schools can use these findings to work towards more supportive learning environments for medical students that destigmatise mental ill-health symptoms and seeking help to alleviate such symptoms,” she added.

Concerns about health worker shortages

The study authors added that medical students leaving school had important implications for the health workforce, globally estimated to have a deficit of 6.4 million doctors.

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In Europe, there have long been concerns about health worker shortages as the population ages. 

One 2020 estimate found that in EU countries and the UK, there could be a shortage of 4.1 million health workers including doctors, nurses, and other professionals by 2030.

The World Health Organization (WHO) Europe office recently launched a survey of health workers to understand their mental health and working conditions, adding that this contributes to professionals leaving the workforce.

A 2022 WHO Europe report on health workers found that they faced extreme pressures, heavy workloads, and stress, highlighting that many European countries entered the pandemic with insufficient workforces.

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One of the report’s suggestions for strengthening the workforce included aligning education with population and health service needs in addition to protecting the mental well-being of workers.