MEDICS are being offered bursaries of £20,000 to train in Cumbria in a bid to tackle a shortage of GPs in the county.

The move is being rolled out in the 109 hardest to recruit training places in England.

The bursaries will be available from a pilot scheme funded by NHS England and run by the GP National Recruitment Office (GPNRO).

GP trainees on the scheme will also be given the option to complete an additional year of training with North Cumbria University Hospitals Trust where they will be trained full time in a hospital special interest, paid on a salaried GP scale.

It is hoped that trained GPs will then continue to work within the area supporting both primary care and the acute hospital.

Special interests available to them include Emergency Medicine, Acute Medicine, Elderly Care Medicine, General Surgery, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Paediatrics and Ophthalmology.

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Last year a GP survey by NHS Cumbria Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) found that as of September 2015 Cumbria had 23 vacancies which represents around eight per cent of the GP workforce in the county.

It also revealed that some vacancies had been empty for more than two years and some had been advertised as many as eight times.

Dr David Rogers, Medical Director, NHS Cumbria Clinical Commissioning Group, said: “We hope this will encourage more medics at the start of their careers to choose Cumbria as a place to live and train. We know that if people train in an area they are more likely to choose to stay and work there.”

Further details of the scheme are listed on the National Recruitment Office website: https://gprecruitment.hee.nhs.uk/Recruitment/TERS.