Funding NHS support for teaching: A spanner in the internal market?

Classroom teaching of medical undergraduates is supported by a range of activities which take place on NHS sites. The teaching hospitals that host these activities receive a subsidy to compensate for the burden placed on their resources. In addition, there is an informal trading of time between NHS-employed and university-employed staff. The imprecision of these two mechanisms will affect the costs incurred by teaching hospitals, and, therefore, the prices they charge for their services—this has implications for their position as competitors in the NHS internal market.