What is widening participation in Medicine?
Widening participation (WP) is a government initiative offering opportunities to groups of people who are under-represented in higher education. For example: students from low socio-economic backgrounds, or who are care experienced or who have refugee status.
To enable to students whose academic performance has been impacted by their personal circumstances to study Medicine, we follow the University of Nottingham Contextual Admission Policy.
Recommendations specific to studying Medicine in the UK have been made by Medical Schools Council. Widening Participation means “increasing the number of people from groups that have historically had a lower participation rate in medical education.”
“The key issue for medicine, is the under representative number of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.” -
Selecting for Excellence Final Report Medical Schools Council 2014
In 2024, Medical Schools Council reviewed the progress that had been made in widening participation in Medicine through the previous 10 years and found that considerable progress had been made in increasing accessibility and equity of access. In order to maintain progress in widening participation the following recommendations have been made:
Attraction
- ensuring that young people understand that medicine is a career for them. Outreach will be key to this and must become more targeted at under represented groups and under doctored areas.
Admissions
- ensuring the selection processes used by medical schools give all candidates a fair chance of success and appropriately take into account the context of individuals. Getting this right will involve developing new approaches to selection and evaluating current processes to ensure they remain fit for purpose.
Attainment
- ensuring that every student has the ability to excel on the course no matter what their background. To do this it will be important to understand the needs of students from diverse backgrounds and properly support students from lower socio-economic backgrounds once they enter medical school.
Fostering Potential - 10 years on from Selecting for Excellence Medical Schools Council 2024