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.

But surely the whole 'forward planning' thing is completely pointless of those doctors aren't given the opportunity to gain the experience or the training to be able to go further? Its only going to be useful as forward planning if the med students stay here in the UK and train here. If we just keep recruiting experienced doctors from abroad into roles that should be given to these med students then whats the point?

They do not have employment lined up - does not mean they are yet unemployed.

Resident doctors have gone to OZ after foundation years for the past 20 yrs -sfor many this is an active choice to experience somethng new and jumpr off the treadmill which churns you out so fast you do not know i oyu ahve made the right choice,

If you went ot OZ by choice and did not apply for CT training then that does not mean you were denied a job, you failed ot take part and made a different choice. If oyu applied did not get and then went to Oz totally different scenario.

We are talking about the FY2s that completed their FY2 year in August, they were unemployed at that point. They may have found employment now but not necessarily as doctors or in the uk.

One of the challenges that I don't think has been mentioned so far is that some "deaneries" - the group of hospitals to which resident doctors apply to do their further tracing - are not very popular. It has proved very difficult to get these posts filled by young, UK trained doctors.

The obvious solution is that if it isn't possible to shortlist suitable uk candidates then doctors from other countries can apply.

This is what other sensible countries do.

I don't think junior doctors of whatever they call themselves now, come out with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of debt. And there's no shortage of applicants. Maybe they should be paid a bit more but let's stop the violin playing.

Looks like the Times have picked this up.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/d4534d98-1c1a-4699-83fd-4dcd7a363344?shareToken=bed10b9213754d043c6dbb90c3a2f8ae

£10,000 pa fees for a minimum of five years, plus rent and living expenses for those years - bearing in mind work load, placement and shorter holidays make it harder to get student jobs like those studying other subjects. How do you think they fund all that? The answer is debt.

The whole of Scotland is one deanery - can be sent anywhere in that deanery to work. Not ideal if you are an ST5 perhaps with children at the age of 30.
The insecurity of the training programme especially for the general medical trainees is shocking.

That's terrible.

Honestly I think the BMA are the most useless union ever.

Pay is not the problem. It's these mad working terms and conditions and the open worldwide competition for training posts.

Or is it that doctors can't legally strike about the above only pay?

But do you actually know @Viviennemary or is this just a guess? With a son and daughter in law who are both hospital doctors, I can assure you they have substantial debt. In any case, this sort of misses the point imho. Their treatment, in terms of moving every year whilst under training and all the hurdles that are put in place to continue that training, are bound to cause resentment within their cohort and I have a lot of sympathy for them.

The BMA management committee are left-wing ideologues who want to pretend sex doesn’t exist.

Other HCPs are being treated just as appallingly.

The Welsh government has had to step in regarding newly qualified paramedics. They have all been given 2 year fixed term contracts to do their NQP period on band 5 then they will be out when they got band 6. Without the nqp period complete they would be unemployable and their qualification worthless.

There are paramedics from the South Wales valleys working on Anglesey. Some of them were mature students who have partners, families and mortgages hundreds of miles away.

They can't apply for jobs outside Wales because they took burseries, in good faith, that will have to be paid back in full if they leave the Welsh NHS (not sure of the tie in period).

There is no capacity in the rotas so they are all 'relief' staff therefore they have no flow to their shift patterns, so their sleep is badly disrupted by quick turn arounds from days to nights and back again, and they don't have long enough gaps between shifts to get back to their homes and families miles away.

They have been cruelly let down and the government should hang their heads in shame, and then sort something proper out for them.

Most NHS clinical staff are exploited because they care.
Unfortunately administrators and senior managers don't give a shit

Yes you are right. And I believe there is a similar situation with nurses and midwives.

I follow a GP on Instagram who has been made redundant

I think that is an even more different thing than the OP is talking about.

Many administrators and managers absolutely do care. But there are also a lot of incompetent ones that just get shoved into another department during reorganisations, or are too expensive to make redundant (incompetency based dismissal is nigh on impossible). Or responsibilities pushed down the chain to low paid clerical staff. You just need to look at the shower of incompetents wheeled out to support the NHS in the Darlington nurses case - senior manager after senior manager denying any responsibility for anything that happens supposedly under their purview.

A lot of the issues with the NHS date back to the compromises necessary to bring doctors’ private businesses into the NHS, so it was run from the start as a series of fiefdoms rather than a cohesive health system.

I have come across so many in the SLTs that come in with wild ideas (often that have been trialled and failed before) put them into action then get a promotion at a different trust before the shit hits the fan.
There are a few I see on linked in blowing their own trumpets and posing with the famous at every opportunity.

Unfortunately it is the lower banded admin and clerical who carry the load and are the first to be let go.

Unfortunately not enough FY2s are heading for a training post - they are heading for Australia or a series of locum or junior clinical fellow posts while reapplying for the following intake of training places.

They are also competing on an open market with any doctor, worldwide, who wants to apply here. And thousands of UK candidates are being left unemployed as a result, and having to apply alongside the following years’ cohorts as a result. It must be changed to be like nearly every other job - overseas candidates are only considered if no appropriately qualified UK candidate is available - just like Australia do. But that is not what is happening. The overseas candidates are applying for, and being given posts in, the same popular deanaries as the UK doctors.

@Legobricksinatub what I can't understand is why don't the government just make this very obvious change? They are the government why should they care what the BMA is or isn't doing. Have you written to your MP about it?

Mine refused to take my points onboard. It feels like a weird quirk where some left/liberal people simply cannot concieve there could ever be any downsides to immigration.

What bugs me is that it isn't even reciprocal. At least with the EU we got rights to work there too.

I don’t know. It seems such an obvious and easy change. Perhaps it might reduce their argument that the NHS relies on overseas doctors and therefore all immigration is a ‘good thing’? The BMA’s response is that there should be an unlimited supply of training posts for anyone who wants to come here.

If that is really the BMA's position it makes no sense at all.