Campaign launches to introduce schoolchildren to health careers

Medical students, doctors, and other healthcare professionals are being asked to volunteer to talk to primary school children across the country about their jobs as part of a national campaign to boost career aspirations and widen participation from an early age.

The Who’s in Health? campaign, which formally launched this month, is a joint initiative between the Medical Schools Council (MSC), the National Association of Head Teachers, and the charity Education and Employers. The scheme aims to provide a bank of volunteers for all 23 000 primary schools in England to help 7-11 year olds see the relevance of what they are learning in science, maths, and English and to broaden and raise their future career prospects.

The campaign arose in response to the final report of the MSC’s Selecting for Excellence group, which was published last December.1 The report said that outreach projects that introduce children to medicine should be available to children across the country, rather than just those who live near a medical school, as the general consensus is that many of the barriers to aspiration start early.

Selecting for Excellence was set up in 2013 in response to criticism from Alan Milburn, who was “social mobility tsar” at the time, that not enough was being done to widen participation in medicine and to ensure that the best candidates were able to become doctors, irrespective of their social background.2

Since then the Selecting for Excellence group has produced several reports and guidelines for medical schools on the ways of helping those from less privileged backgrounds to pursue a medical career, including guidance recommending that outreach start in primary schools and follow pupils through to an application to study medicine.3

But many medical schools have struggled to offer outreach services. “Medical schools have reported challenges in engaging with primary school age children, and very few medical schools undertake this type of outreach,” Clare Owen, a policy adviser at MSC and lead on the Who’s in Health? campaign, told BMJ Careers. “For those from poorer backgrounds, being exposed to positive role models at this stage can have a significant impact,” she said.

The MSC is particularly keen for medical students and young GPs to get involved in the campaign. “The important thing is that this campaign will be ongoing. We would like it to always be a resource for health professionals, especially medics and medical students, to get into primary schools and inspire children. Longer term, we’ll be using some data analysis, which is under way now, to target certain parts of the country where there is minimal or no outreach happening,” said Owen.

Volunteers and schools who wish to take part in the campaign can connect via the free online matchmaking service, Primary Futures, by registering here: www.inspiringthefuture.org/primary-futures/.