Education and training in the NHS use a great deal of our public resources. This investment plays not only a very significant role in developing the NHS, but also plays a much wider role in developing our society. The fact that tens of thousands of teenagers in every generation work hard to get into clinical education demonstrates the central role that the NHS plays in people’s lives.

As with education we have a mixed system of providers of health care – some are private and some publically owned – and, just as with private schools, privately owned health providers gain from training that has been paid for from the public purse. Off and on, over the 60 years since the inception of the NHS, the issue of gain by private health companies of public resources has been raised.