Junior Doctors Unemployment in August

[PurpleFairyLights]

Name changed but long term poster. Have a child that is in this situation with 100k of student debt.

https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2025-05-07/bma-we-could-potentially-see-thousands-of-unemployed-doctors

Unbelievable this was allowed. Most countries protect their medical graduates.

South Africa doesn’t recruit heavily from the UK? Are you thinking of the AHP scheme, which was a casualty of Covid?

@wannabewitch that exam has a 50% failure rate (because it’s v v v hard) so lots people will pay it more than once. It’s also only one of several exams they’ll have to sit. Add on GMC fees, indemnity and other costs, most medics are paying upwards of £2,000 a year just to do their job.

But if they don’t have a job then it’s all a waste. Yes it’s always been competitive but everyone could get A job, whether training or some kind of F3. This is not the case this year. For a projected 20,000 doctors. We already have GPs driving Ubers and working in Tesco. What a waste.

And S Africa are actively recruiting F2s this year, along with Aus, NZ and even USA. They recognise how great our doctors training has been and want them, even if the NHS doesn’t. It wants doctors who it can control by telling them they’ll revoke their visas is they strike or refuse to work illegal hours.

This topic is difficult as we are a non medical family and the structures and acronyms are so complicated.

I don't think South Africa recruit heavily, but I did see mention of them, perhaps when looking at a recruitment agency website, and somewhere else. I recently saw something about how UK doctors were recruited only for more remote locations. In the context of us being the only comparable country that does not give preference for key positions to its own residents.

You may be right and it is a scheme that died a death with Covid.

Happy to learn more.

Don't think that's true. My best friend is a Kiwi doctor, in New Zealand, and they gripe that UK doctors are often given plum hours and positions to placate them, while she was sent out to the wopwops.

I’m really interested in this about South Africa - can anyone link me to their recruitment sites etc?

there was an organisation called Africa Health Placements (AHP) that recruited UK doctors for 1-2 year placements in underserved rural areas in South Africa government hospitals. They worked closely with a few deaneries, I think Peninsula was one of them, one of the London deaneries was another and it was possible to apply for GP specialist training with a year abroad doing a placement with AHP. It was also possible to apply off your own bat directly to AHP. The placements were well regarded in terms of experience - in a rural government hospital you’ll do absolutely everything.

you may be able to tell that I have experience of this! When we were in SA I was aware of a few UK doctors who wanted to stay on longer, having met SA partners etc, and it was extremely difficult for them to move into permanent posts. So interested in the landscape has changed.

This year?

There may be a case for this perception at a time when there were shortages down under and active recruitment campaigns in the UK. Going through an agency, whether from, say, Malawi to the UK, or from the UK to Australia takes a lot of the leg work out of the process and agencies will have built up longer term relationships with hospital recruitment staff than individuals and offer practical support (CVs, interview technique) and mentoring. (There is resentment in the UK about strong relationships overseas agencies have with individual hospitals leaving local staff feeling they don't get a look in.)

One reason why UK doctors looking for work in the UK are on the back foot is that despite it being so competitive they don't receive targeted careers advice/support that would help them deliver polished applications. If they were at University they would have access to a University careers department.

Instead DD is working nights, often staying late because the consultant is late carrying out the ward round or she has not had time to complete handover notes. At best she might find time to scribble off an application before getting some sleep, but the odds are so long it is hardly worth it. At the moment her job has to be her priority. It was always going to be busy. They are 3 F2s down out of six and work involves travelling to smaller hospitals across a wide rural area. She spent a couple of weekends before starting batch cooking so she could save time. Great for learning and experience. Unfortunately of no help in career terms.

Australia etc must now be flooded with applications and will know they won't need to make any effort. DD was getting recommendations for places to apply to from senior colleagues who had previously worked in Australia. Even with personal contacts she got nowhere. Vacancies had been filled. If she can't get enough NHS bank work where she is, she will apply again, this time using an agency and fully aware that despite a strong CV and good references it might not be the speciality she wants, and that she won't get to choose where she goes.

What an unpleasant post.

DC is ready and seniors agree.

DC has high rent due to location . Think paying mortgage type payment for a room in a shared house. Also has to run a car to go between sites so money does not go far.

Both exams passed first time.

Yes, this year. DD had a job lined up in Aus - took 2 weeks from start to finish. She gets emails every week from recruiters for all courses tried mentioned asking if she’ll come work there. Australia even did a recruitment day at her local hospital ! It’s hard to say no when they offer so much.

You’re not going to working in central Sydney or Auckland. But Noosa was an option as was Hawked Bay, both beautiful parts of the world. If willing to work in rural outback hours the pay is huge.

Apologies for typos. 5 minute break between teaching not a good time to compose a post !

It’s getting traction

https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2025-05-07/bma-we-could-potentially-see-thousands-of-unemployed-doctors?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR5rqCaaS9gqpOOVrHbPcSW71Hy3lGfs__ozFdHbR7IuLFSxlhyewIRuSv5KWw_aem_3xJRdPWd5FUjJ9X0_kevOg

My daughter is in a similar position and was mightily relieved to get a six-month clinical fellowship.

She finished in the top 10% of med school and has published papers and has excellent references from f1 and f2. Before I understood the issue, I scoffed when she said she would find it hard to get a job. The joke was on me.

When her six months are up, she’s off to Australia for six months. Perhaps more.

As to the ethics of using doctors trained by countries that are less well off than the Uk, don’t start me.

Tax payers should be asking some hard questions about the waste of public funds training doctors and then discarding them.

They used to say in the 90s that there were more Malawian doctors in Manchester than in Malawi. Don’t know if that was true!

And how wrong is that. Taking doctors from red list countries is immoral. Makes me v mad too.

This is a problem which seems to have been engineered by successive governments. It is hard to see why, and very hard on the current juniors.

It is much easier to get in to medical school now than it used to be because of the expansion of medical school places. This has led to a massive increase in the number of graduates every year. There were 7500 graduates in 1965, 50 years later in 2015 there were 18000. There will be even more now because there have been at least 3 new medical schools opened since then.

Because there hasn't been a similar expansion in the number of consultant and G.P. jobs it simply means that competition is happening further down the line, with two and a half times as many juniors trying to get the same number of jobs. So students who would not have been accepted to study medicine in the past are now part of a larger cohort fighting for promotion. It was probably necessary to do this in order to cut juniors hours. I see people complaining about working 48 hour weeks, previously with less than half the number of junior doctors they worked 80 hour weeks ( and consequently had had twice as much training as they have now when they were promoted.)
Before anyone starts on me for wanting to go back to the dark ages I certainly do not! But if we want the same amount of work done with a civi!used working week we have to accept that many more junior doctors will not progress than in the past.

The scandal isn't that there is international competition for work, there always has been. (And good luck with trying to get The Guardian or Newsnight to blame immigrants for this mess!)
The scandal is that medical students were not made aware that a large proportion of them would not secure long term employment in the N.H.S.

@oddandelsewhere there are 13,000 approx training places and 12,000 medical students. It should be straight forward. But it’s not, because IMGs have flooded the system.

This. Just this is the problem, and this was 2023. This year over 22,000 IMGs have applied for the same number of jobs.

And if there were only 6000 medical students it would be much easier. We have more medical graduates than we can afford.

@oddandelsewhere no we don’t. We have the same number (actually less) medical students than jobs that need to be filled every year. If UK graduates were prioritised they’d all get training posts and then excess jobs can be opened up to the world. So so simple.

@wannabewitch no one has said it’s cheaper, have they? Though I guess you could argue that recruiting a overqualified IMG with 10 years’ experience for a FY 3 or St1 job is getting plenty of bang for your buck.

I did read the article posted previously, and honestly, I’m none the wiser as to why the BMA aren’t jumping up and down about this! What is the business case for allowing IMGs to flood the market when there are sufficient UK trained doctors? Someone mentioned earlier about BMA figures with a business interest in o/s recruiting, if that’s true, there’s a conflict of interest if I ever saw one! Are people chucking around accusations of racism to shut down discussion and stop people pointing out the bleeding obvious? I think so.

@mumsneedwine but it also seems simple that employers should pick the best candidates rather than the most British ones. This will be based on ability, experience and education. As a taxpayer I am happy if the best are picked partly from the highest achieving British cohort and partly from the highest achieving international one.
All medical graduates can be doctors, but some will only be doctors for two years.

I think this is part of the problem. I suspect a lot of young people who are drawn to Australia would want to live in Sydney or Melbourne, but they’re unlikely to get a job there. Not sure why the middle of nowhere in Australia is preferable to middle of nowhere in the UK, except maybe the weather (and the pay?). In any case, the aversion to moving around the UK is not a luxury any medical graduate can afford. Of course if there are no jobs even in the middle of nowhere in the UK, that’s another kettle of fish.

Hawkes Bay is the most beautiful part of NZ and it's not even my native bit. She should bite their hand off.

Why do you think no other country in the world choses to follow this policy?

Utter madness to pay huge amounts of money to train young people who either stop being doctors after two years or move abroad.

@LeviOceanStar well they are needed in the earliest years to cover all the work now that they have normal working hours. After that the best of them will get promoted and the others will find work in related fields. We spend money training lawyers, many of whom will not subsequently be employed in law. That has been the situation for more than a decade, they don't complain about foreigners taking their jobs. We a!so spend money on people taking totally meaningless degrees, or people (like me!) studying arts subjects which did not lead directly to a job. Why is it only the money spent educating doctors that must be recouped at all costs?

What about for ALL other occupations for which the uk has a sufficient local workforce? Engineers, teachers, plumbers, policeman, firemen, shop workers, hairdressers, basket weavers….Shouldn’t they be included too?

Its not a question of the ‘most British’, here we go again with the veiled racism accusations. Read the thread and have a think about why the NHS should prioritise adequately British trained doctors. It’ll come to you.