Ok so this is the email I just sent to my MP. I also added a few personal details which I have removed from the copy below.
There are around 13000 places each year in the UK for medical speciality training. This is the training that doctors undertake to become specialists or GPs following on from five years of medical school and two years of foundation training. The problem is that in 2019 the government removed the prioritisation given to UK citizens for these training places. There are now 33000 applicants competing for training places with 63% of applications coming from overseas. Young resident doctors who are UK citizens and have studied and worked in the UK have no priority and now face the real prospect of failing to gain a training place or even becoming unemployed. I believe that we are the only country in the world not to prioritise our own medics in this way.
This represents both an enormous waste of the government's money, given that each medical student costs around 250k to train, and of the potential of our young people. Each young doctor in the UK will have borrowed money to study and spent five years studying and a further two years working in the NHS. Many of them will under the present system be forced to see their careers stagnate, seek alternative employment outside of medicine or emigrate to a country such as Australia which has vacancies.
I would please ask you to hold the government to account for this lack of sensible planning. The UK should follow the lead of every other country in the world in prioritising its own medical graduates and citizens for training places, only advertising them to candidates from abroad if the vacancies cannot be filled.