This new scheme will offer a one off bursary of £20,000 to GP trainees committed to working in one of 109 training places in England that have been hard to recruit to for the past three years.   Places in the Northern Lincolnshire (Scunthorpe & Grimsby) GP Scheme will be part of this initiative.
 
It is recognised that these areas often have an extremely good track record for education, but are initially less popular simply because of their geographical location.
 
The bursary will be paid as a lump sum on starting the training post and will be administered by the local Health Education England office where the appointment is based.
 
Round 1 applicants will have received an email informing them of the bursary programme and the action to take if they are interested. Those interested in the scheme should review their preferences within their GP application within Oriel prioritising a ‘hard to recruit to’ training place and resubmit their preferred training locations by Friday 12 February 2016. In the event that any of the hard to recruit training places are oversubscribed, standard recruitment and selection processes for training places will be applied.

Applicants will only receive their bursary once they have signed an agreement to complete the three year placement, with no relocation option. Should a trainee need to leave their training place before completing their three year placement, they will be required to make a pro-rata repayment of the bursary.

The Humberside Group of LMCs was represented at the Conference by:
 
Dr Andrea Fraser (Chair, North & North East Lincolnshire LMC)
Dr Anne Jeffreys (Chair, Hull & East Yorkshire LMC)
Dr Zoë Norris
Dr Karena Platts
 
Dr Russell Walshaw attended as an Observer
 
There were eight main subject headings and in each heading were one or more motions constructed from the hundreds of motions submitted by the LMCs.   This conference was different in that we only debated 16 motions in a day instead of the usual 40 normally debated in one day.
 
A webcast of the full conference is still available on the BMA website at:
 
http://www.bma.org.uk/lmcconference
 
At the beginning John Canning proposed that the agenda as set should be rejected and the conference should determine what it wanted to debate.  After much debate the conference voted to proceed as set out in the Agenda papers.   Whereas many representatives stated that the composite motions were not appropriate for addressing the crisis it was nevertheless the LMCs that had submitted all the motions.  Once the procedural discussions had been resolved the conference opened with a report from the Chairman of the GPC, Dr Chaand Nagpaul which was received with a standing ovation.  
 
The full text of the speech at:
 
http://www.bma.org.uk/working-for-change/negotiating-for-the-profession/bma-general-practitioners-committee/special-lmc-conference/special-lmc-conference-speech
 
At a later slot there was also a short speech from Dr Maureen Baker which outlined the RCGP view and this is available at:
 
http://www.rcgp.org.uk/news/2016/january/maureen-baker-speech-lmcs-conference.aspx
 
Details of the debates are shown in the chart below.  The gist of the steps forward can be summarised essentially as:
 
1. A minimum of 11% of NHS total budget spent in general practice
2. Removal of premises negative equity trap via a “purchaser of last resort” measure
3. Accelerated, standardised and funded national returner scheme
4. Suspension of the appraisal and inspection regime
5. Politician-led public measures (including contractual changes) to limit demand during our “state of emergency"
 
The subject areas debated were as follows:

• Workload
• Workforce
• Future of the NHS
• Regulation
• Premises
• Funding
• Indemnity
• Solutions