Widening Participation

We are a student-led widening participation initiative aimed at inspiring and supporting sixth-form students from underprivileged schools across Greater London to consider medicine and surgery as potential career paths. Medicine is becoming increasingly competitive, with disadvantaged students feeling the biggest impact. Statistics from the Sutton Trust show that independent school applicants are 1.5 times more likely to receive a medicine offer than those from non-selective state schools, while applicants from working-class backgrounds make up only 5% of the total.

To help bridge this gap, we plan to host around 60 students from local state schools for a full day of interactive workshops, talks, and networking. We are committed to making this conference completely free for all attendees, as many participants receive free school meals and would otherwise face financial barriers to accessing opportunities like this.

We aim to make this year's conference the biggest and best it has been by providing sixth formers access to state-of-the-art technology. We want them to really get a taste of what medicine is like through:

• Surgical virtual-reality (VR) sets
• Anatomy and dissection models
• Suturing practice