Newly trained doctors-you need to know this

[2020Raquet]

DSS3 is about to be a newly qualified FY2 doctor along without about 8,000 from his cohort (number who qualified this year). There are about 1000 jobs for them to apply for in the NHS this year. So we, the tax payer have paid an average of £250,000 to £327,009 to train these doctors over the past 7-9 years and 87% will not have a job.

A simple google search (appreciate that not be the most accurate, so happy to be corrected if based on facts) show that 20,060 doctors immigrated to the U.K. in 2024.

DSS3 is emigrating because he has little other choice.

The doctors strikes are not based on money, but the fact that they come out of uni with £100’s of £1,000’s of debt in a job apparently vital in the U.K., but with no job prospects!!

AIBU to believe the system has failed.

Only 7.5% of medical students are international students.

So you are arguing that it is better to exploit workers from other countries rather than be forced to improve conditions for carers in order to attract UK workers into this profession?

My DS finished his foundation training and took a year out and went to Oz. Applying for training posts here and is finding it very competitive plus as there aren’t enough training posts lots of drs are now locuming so there aren’t many locum opportunities either. He is now thinking about staying and training in Oz. It’s terrible that this is the situation that they are finding themselves in.

edit : sp

Honestly, I think your experience is very unusual. Most people even on this thread have reported a different experience. That seems to apply to both the HCPs and the patients. But regardless of this, surely the chief point is that it makes no sense in any way to train UK doctors and then force a large percentage of them to leave to gain employment at the same time as pilfering doctors from other countries who also need doctors and nurses.

I don’t think anyone is saying that all medical staff from overseas are not as good as those trained here, there will be different levels of competence throughout both groups. However, language barriers and cultural differences can create further risks, even if completely competent in all other areas.

My DS is a first year med student and I genuinely worry about the opportunities available to him in years to come after racking up thousands in debt, and personally believe that uk jobs should be filled by the people the uk taxpayers have invested in training, until the relevant skills available in that pool are exhausted.

So you are saying there is a bottle neck because we don’t have enough training places to train all the overseas doctors who want to come here as well as our own FY2 doctors? Why should we offer to train any overseas doctor who wants that?

In terms of getting points for things like research; research in many other countries is carried out by technicians and only ‘led’ by the researcher. They don’t do the grunt work, gather results, or even do the first write-up. They may give input to the protocol, possibly some oversight, and some adjustments to the manuscript. In the UK a junior doctor (or other researcher) carrying out research is expected to do the actual research work and drafting too. In the UK technicians are just there to ensure the labs are run efficiently, not do the experiments. I’ve seen a good number of overseas researchers get given short shrift by university technicians when they try to treat them as they would a technician in their own country. It is also too often apparent, just how much of the researchers research skills were actually down to those technicians. Not that you would know that from the papers they cite.

Got you.

Is there any data for how many overseas F2s are being recruited to UK training posts ?

Is it maybe a case of training hospitals being attracted by higher fees they can charge overseas folk, similar to universities ?

Ahh. Found this:

Specialty training squeeze (bma.org.uk)

From that: "The unique number of IMGs applying to specialty training doubled between 2023 and 2025 (from 10,402 to 20,803), whereas the number of UK medical graduates increased by 33 per cent (9,283 to 12,305). But, in 2023, UK graduates were offered 59 per cent of training posts, versus 41 per cent for IMGs – equal to their proportion in the workforce at the time."

Article goes on to split up the numbers by specialty.

Complex for sure.

But, in 2023, UK graduates were offered 59 per cent of training posts, versus 41 per cent for IMGs – equal to their proportion in the workforce at the time.

Why is it OK to discriminate against UK graduates like this? Why aren’t they getting 100% of training posts?

for me its not racism but i do know what a slog its is to get into med school and then go through the years of hard work to not get a training place! nothing to do with immigration etc. but we do need to ensure that kids can see a future for themselves

To be honest back in the mid 90s, I came across a not insignificant number of white British midwives and a white British HV who were not capable of recording information correctly, sometimes writing down the opppsite of my wishes arising from a discussion we had had. In one case a midwife failed three times to order the correct blood test relating to an underlyimg chronic, autoimmune health condition. Clearly their communication skills in their native language were poor, and yet they must have passed exams.

because not all uk trained doctors are up to the job and would you rather have a brilliant overseas doc trained or a sub par uk one just because they trained here. Open competition

medicine ahs always been competitive, overseas doctors ahve always come over ans still will - i

I don't know how this all slid to a linguistic discussion, but language ability or absence thereof aside, surely if we pay to train them, we should benefit from their training - i.e. we should not let them leave until they pay back in kind (by working in the NHS) for a number of years and we should certainly prioritise locally trained (of whatever colour and language ability) over imports. Would it not be similar to training the best athletes paid by the public purse to let them compete against us under different flags? It just seems mad.

Just 5 years ago, I accompany my nan to A&E and hear, on the other side of the curtain, a posh English junior doctor asking an elderly man 'where did you fall?' three times. After receiving the same answer three times, a nurse came to the doctor's rescue - 'which part of your body came into contact with the pavement first'. Language barrier, eh?

Yanbu.

It is a travesty that UK medical graduates are being trained, to become unemployed afterwards. It's a major failure of workforce planning. Either we need these doctors, and therefore there are training programme places for them, or we do not need them, and therefore we should not be training them. Training doctors at huge cost, only for them to have to leave the UK to get a job, is in no ones interest.

UK medical graduates should be prioritised over international medical graduates, and there should be sufficient training posts available for UK graduates.

Unemployed doctor here! I wouldn’t be able to get a job if I tried - not trying at this stage in life, at home with SEN child and baby. But mad to think patients wait so long in A&E or on the wards to be seen and I have all this knowledge and experience (paid for in part by the public) but hospitals just don’t have enough job positions. DH works in anaesthetics and ICU and PRAYING he is able to get a consultant job when he finishes his training in a couple of years. Otherwise no idea what we’ll do.

Because it will take a very long for our country to come to its senses and recover and until that time this behaviour will be considered acceptable and even laudable in some quarters.

ive never read such bullshit saw a doctor many years ago who couldn’t even be bothered with read my medical records - told me I’d grow out of my migraines when I was older or had a baby - the fool if he’d read my records he would have seen I’d had 2 children and a hysterectomy - he jabbered in some strange language which was very hard to understand and when it was pointed out to him I had 2 children and had a hysterectomy (the latter was done when I was in my early thirties)

Clinellwipe - you are not an unemployed doctor - you have made an active decision to withdraw from the medical workforce for family reasons that is very different from saying you have applied and an overseas doctor took your job

I’m not saying an overseas doctor took my job - I said if I were to try to get a job I would not be able to get one. When my son has been in hospital this year there’s always been huge delays in ED and in seeing doctors on the wards , I think most people would say we need more doctor positions being funded ?

What relevance does this have to anything?

Btw I’m not against doctors trained overseas - the majority of the best consultants I’ve worked with over the years have been from abroad, India and Italy being the two countries that jump to my mind when I think of fantastic doctors. But if we’re going to take these fantastic doctors from abroad and give them the training/consultant places in the UK , in theory shouldn’t we reduce the number of medical school places in UK? I’m not saying I think that should happen but surely makes more economical sense

None and it's a bit much to criticise the doctor for 'jabbering in some strange language that was very hard to understand' when the poster can't even form a single sentence in (presumably) her own native language!

Why is it? Doctors must be able to communicate with illiterate patients too.

Why just doctors then? Why not any and all jobs in the UK? Allow employers to recruit via international open competition for all staff? I am sure they would be delighted not to have to pay the sort of wages necessary to keep UK employees. What right should British citizens have to their own country anyway?

Has anyone with knowledge and experience said that some UK Drs are not up to the job? If they have, clearly I missed it. But I think the point that was being made is that some recently qualified UK trained Drs are competing for jobs on training tickets with overseas trained Drs who are actually at a different stage in the medical careers. So, in reality, it's like comparing apples with oranges when you actually only want oranges. It's not that the UK trained ones aren't up to the job. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that you have to apply for these training tickets (and there are insufficient anyway), before you can progress along your speciality training programme. In some cases, such as anaesthetics, not only is it highly competitive to get started on this training route, but halfway along it you have to reapply in order to stay on it. The system is completely bonkers!