Primary care staff factors to enhance student clinical placement

GP surgeries across the UK are testing whether taking on student trainees helps or hinders their daily work. This project, launched in March 2025 under the MIDAS theme, ran workshops with the Morecambe Bay Primary Care Collaborative to measure how student placements affect staffing time and patient contacts, comparing them to non-placement training methods. The problem is that primary care is stretched thin, and practices hesitate to host students if it slows down patient care or overloads staff. Without clear evidence, placement programmes remain underused, limiting the pipeline of future GPs and nurses. If this research succeeds, it will produce evidence-based recommendations that show exactly how placements influence service delivery—whether they save time, cost time, or shift workloads in unexpected ways. That could help NHS managers and practice partners decide confidently where and how to run placements, potentially expanding training capacity without compromising patient access. The work is practical, not fundamental: it directly addresses a logistical bottleneck in healthcare workforce planning, with the immediate goal of optimising how new clinicians are trained in real-world settings.