Fewer study places in Aarhus will not produce more doctors in the rest of Jutland

This debate piece was published in Altinget on 16 September 2026.

The demand has now been made twice in short succession. If cuts are to be made to intake on the medical degree programme, they should happen in Copenhagen and Aarhus. First from the chairman of Danish Regions, Mads Duedahl (V), in an interview with TV2 Nord, and most recently from the medical programme in Esbjerg, here in Altinget.

What the two proposals have in common is that they come from institutions and regions that have themselves been allocated new study places for medicine in recent years — unlike Aarhus. They also have in common that they point to cuts happening elsewhere, not at their own institutions. And this before anyone has answered the question of how many doctors Denmark will actually need… and for what.

We welcome the dialogue on how many doctors we should train, and how we ensure good medical coverage across the whole country. But that dialogue must be grounded in the capacity of the education system and in national needs. Otherwise we risk turning a major question about the future of Danish healthcare into a local political conflict.

We still lack answers on how many doctors we will need

The starting point for the entire debate is a projection pointing to a surplus of doctors by 2035.

But a projection says nothing about how many doctors will be needed once the healthcare reform genuinely shifts tasks closer to citizens. Nor does a projection say how that need will be distributed across specialties or geography, or what it means that the population is aging and becoming more chronically ill.

It is only a few years since 140 extra study places were created on medical programmes — not on the basis of a needs analysis, but as the result of a closed political process, at a point when the effects of the increased 2019 intake had not yet been seen.

A significant reduction in intake now would lead to a kind of stop-and-go governance that neither society nor the universities can sustain. That is why it is essential to carry out the right analysis.

The decision on medical student intake is, in effect, a decision about how many specialist doctors Denmark will have available roughly 13 years later. If we cut too little, it can be corrected within a few years. If we cut too much, we won't discover it until the shortage is already there.

That is why our main call to the minister is that a national analysis of future doctor needs should be carried out before intake numbers are changed.

We have done exactly what politicians asked us to do

In recent years, successive governments have expressed a strong wish to spread education programmes across the whole country. We have delivered on that agenda.

Aarhus University has established a master's programme in Herning. We did this by moving 60 master's-level study places from the Aarhus campus to the Herning campus — notably without being allocated any new study places, unlike what happened to the north and south of us.

In doing so, we are actively contributing to training more doctors closer to one of the areas where they are needed. This should be seen in light of the fact that, for many years, it has been difficult in the Central Denmark Region to recruit a sufficient number of doctors in several parts of the region. We are working together on good solutions to that.

We therefore agree with those who point out that strong educational environments can also be built outside the major cities. We are in the process of building one ourselves.

Geography is one factor among several

Mads Duedahl argues on the basis of geography. Doctors settle where they trained, he said in an interview with TV 2 Nord.

Geography matters, and place of education also matters for where people settle. But the figures clearly show that the connection is not clear-cut. Four out of ten medical graduates from Aarhus University are currently employed outside the Central Denmark Region, and 47 percent work outside the country's four largest cities.

Our graduates are spread across all of Jutland, and Aarhus University currently trains roughly as many doctors for Southern and Northern Jutland as the University of Southern Denmark and Aalborg University do, respectively.

In other words, reducing the number of medical study places in Aarhus will not move doctors to southern or northern Jutland. Instead, it will remove doctors from the country as a whole — and if medical coverage is to be improved in the areas the Danish Health Authority has identified as at risk of coverage shortfalls, that requires measures other than fewer study places in Aarhus.

Contact

Dean Anne-Mette Hvas
Faculty of Health, Aarhus University
Email: dean@health.au.dk
Phone: 87152007