New courses are to be created at three Scottish universities in a bid to boost GP numbers, the Scottish Government has announced.

Ministers said they would fund 85 additional places at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen to assist with their aim of employing 800 more doctors in the NHS over the next ten years.

Edinburgh University plans to offer 25 places to existing healthcare professionals who wish to retrain as GPs as part of a five-year course.

The course, thought to be the first of its kind in the UK, will be part-time and mostly online for the first three years, meaning students can continue in their roles in the NHS as they retrain.

Glasgow and Aberdeen universities will each offer 30 places for new courses which will focus more on general practice.

It comes amid long-running concerns within the medical profession of a GP shortage in Scotland, which has been attributed to rising stress among doctors.

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Scotland has said the country needs nearly 900 new GPs in the next three years to cope with rising demand.

Official statistics published in March showed a "continued decrease" in the number of GPs working full time, which has fallen from 51% in 2013 to 37% last year.

The new university courses will boost the number of medical places at Scottish institutions to a record 1038, with 60 of the places coming into force in 2019/20, followed by the final 25 in 2020/21.

Health secretary Shona Robison said the "innovative" plans would "allow experienced healthcare professionals who may be interested in becoming doctors to enter medicine".

She continued: "The courses will include more involvement of GPs in teaching and assessment and enhanced GP placements in deprived and rural settings.

"While our new GP contract will make general practice a more attractive career by cutting workloads and giving doctors more time with patients, these new medical places are a further step we are taking to train and retain more family doctors in Scotland."

Scottish Labour health spokesman Anas Sarwar said the party "welcomed any investment" in the health service.

However, he added: "The reality is that after more than a decade in power the SNPs legacy on our heath service is creating a workforce crisis.

"This is yet another sticking plaster solution by an SNP government putting nationalism before our national health service."