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.

You’re missing the fact that this is about a lack of doctor training spaces. This is not about fully qualified doctor roles, which ARE frequently filled by fully qualified doctors from overseas.

F2 doctors are fully registered. F1s aren't.

Can i just add that nurses that come from other countries, have to go through a process and exams to prove that they can nurse to U.K. standards. They can’t just walk into a job. It’s more nuanced than that, but that wouldn’t appease the openly racist this themes on this thread would it.

Also Harold Shipman.

UK. trained old fashioned family doctor. It’s almost like anyone of any colour in any trusted profession can commit terrible crimes.

But your figures do not include 3200 retiring, and 4800 non uk doctors returning overseas!

DD is graduating as a physio next year along with hundreds of others. There just aren't enough jobs available for them all. She is thinking of going to work in NZ.

Nephew due to start F1 next year. He is already thinking of going into pharma work when qualified as so few clinucal jobs available for qualified doctors. And friend's son has recently completed GP training and cannot get a position anywhere in the greater Manchester area (where his wife works and they have a house).

It's depressing.

It's a massive problem

And yet there are many many doctors from overseas who have very thick accents and are difficult to understand. I have spent a lot of time taking my mother back and forth to hospital. Her consultant who seems very nice is so hard to understand that we both come away from appointments none the wiser.
surely there should be some test. I know this Dr has all the words and can probably write well but his pronunciation is heavily accented.

This is alarming. I have a teen dd who is very keen to study medicine - obviously I know about the challenges within the NHS but I didn’t know how impossible it is to get work when you are newly qualified.

What’s the solution? Is this likely to change?

But the issue has been caused by international doctors applying for the roles. Otherwise the number of training places would match the numbers graduating from medical school.

Also it isn't just a problem for doctors. Many nurses seem to be in the same position.

The answer to me seems simple. Current Uk residents should get priority for jobs. If the vacancy can't be filled it should then be possible to consider overseas applicants.

Probably because the NHS don’t do the training anymore, the Universities do it and there’s no joined up thinking, when I trained I was employed by the NHS within the hospital’s school of nursing, they knew what was required, you were trained to a high standard….the unis do not care about competence or patient care, they only want people to pass so they get the funding

I think this is partly true. And I will start by saying that there are some excellent overseas nurses and carers working in our health services - but in my substantial experience, they are the minority. I’ll also say that not all UK trained nurses are great and some leave a lot to be desired.

To practice in the UK, overseas nurses need to provide evidence of meeting NMC English requirements for example having been taught and assessed in English, or pass the English language test. They also need to pass the NMC OSCE - so there are checks there.

So for me, it’s more about the differences in cultural aspects. One of our regional hospitals is now about 70% staffed by Nigerian nurses and porters/domiciliary staff. I’ve experience of the level/type of care from a professional and personal perspective. And they just don’t have the same overall empathy and caring values as locally trained nurses.

For example, one Nigerian patient (an elderly gentleman with prostate cancer who was actually the father of a nurse who’d come here) told me that in Nigeria, most of the hospitals didn’t even have call buzzers so there was no expectation to answer them. Families were expected to come into the hospital to care for their relatives - the nurses/nurse assistants didn’t do “personal care”.

They are also not educated about dignity and person-centred care - patients are just expected to do as they are told, not to have a person centred care plan like our student nurses are required to learn.

There is also the challenge of not being conversant with local dialect/colloquialisms and really thick accents which make communication very challenging - an English language test cannot test this. There was the case where someone died in a care home in England because the nurse making the 999 call could not fully communicate the problem owing to her spoken English.

As a nurse, I feel quite strongly about this and I’ve written about this on many threads- no young 20 something adult Nigerian male is coming to the UK because his dream is to look after elderly British people with dementia, frailty and multiple health conditions - they are coming for the visa and the money and T&C’s the NHS offers.

We really need to make nursing more attractive and be able to fully staff our own places of care.

And agree about the doctors - one medical student (who is about to qualify) I spoke to last week told me he had a 1-in-14 chance of getting any job, anywhere in the UK. Ok they are not bad odds if you’re gambling, but we should be employing all graduating doctors who want to practise medicine or else it’s just been a massive waste of money.

I'm not seeeing racist comments, I'm seeing concerns raised about the numbers of people in our hospitals who have a poor command of the English language which makes communicating with them difficult. I have experienced it more at nurse level but people I think may be nurses may be HCA's wearing a similar uniform. It happens a lot in the big London hospitals, particularly in outpatients.

I have had a couple of particularly difficult exchanges with Nigerian Drs who have, frankly, been very rude. It isn't a recent problem either. Similarly I've dealt with as many home grown doctors who have been equally rude and dismissive. Poor communication is never acceptable but it is easier to make a complaint about a White Brit than an overseas national because there can be no assertion of racism. Poor communication and rudeness are what they are and it should be possible to deal with for what they are.

Equally some of the nicest and most helpful Drs and nurses have been overseas nationals and not white.

Well at least you won't have to worry about doctors from other Englush speaking countries - as I understand it, they are not interested in working all hous for the NHS for rubbish pay and living in a crowded crime-ridden country.

I work with many many doctors of all nationalities the vast majority I’ve met speak good English, I accept that 30-40 years ago this might not have been the case especially in the specialities it was hard to recruit in. But in the last 20 years all I’ve met speak good English I rarely if ever see idiomatic differences. I’ve just had a Zimbabwean and a Greek doctor closely shadowing me both had arrived in the UK fairly recently. In both cases I observed caring interested doctors who took time with their patients and were perfectly understandable and in both cases the patients they met were very impressed and gave positive feedback.
I live and work in a region in the UK with a very strong accent (I’m not local) with some idiomatic differences that I’ve got used to now but I have at times completely misunderstood what my white British colleagues mean (much to their amusement) and they probably say the same thing about me and maybe even the patients I care for might say it and because the accent is so strong I frequently have to ask colleagues and staff to repeat something or slow down. But somehow or other we all get by.
Over the years I’ve listened to many of my colleagues “explaining” to patients what’s wrong with them. I’ve listened to highly educated white British colleagues explain to a patient that they have X or Y and I know what’s wrong with then
and don’t understand what they are trying to say. I’ve also been that relative listening to a doctor about a family members illness and I understood what we being implied (very poor prognosis etc) but my DH and his sister didn’t get it at all as it was all cloaked in a mixture of medical language and an inability to spell out the problem clearly. Again a white British doctor who was probably very articulate away from work but didn’t really know how to break very bad news.
On the other hand I watched an amazing Srilankan doctor born and educated there talk to a distressed parent about his child’s very poor prognosis.
We cannot generalise.

So you’re choosing to ignore the “industrial scale Nigerian qualification fraud” currently being investigated which includes the English tests.

Nope no automatic assumption that HCPs from abroad are inferior but recognition that NHS training is world gold standard and we as tax payers are paying for it. As such I’d like to benefit from that and have more NHS trained staff treating vulnerable members of my family.

The mental health sector which is a sector where communication and quality training is key is dire from psychiatrists down and when you have vulnerable autistic people being treated by staff from a culture who believes they are possessed by the devil and should be dead it’s massively worrying for parents.

It’s great you don’t need to worry about that but vulnerable patients and their carers do. It’s a scandal/ tragedy waiting to happen.

From the NMC Fitness to Practise report 2024/25 - https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/annualreportsandaccounts/2025-annual-ftp-report/annual-fitness-to-practise-report-20242025.pdf?tid=rYSMkpZPgM-vDKRimNjqiQ%3D%3D&tuuid=mapoSl2nTyOMnTziT5iTrA&tq=nmc+the+code&ttags=language%3Aen%2Csiteid%3Ad6891695-0234-463b-bf74-1bfb02644b38%2Candquerymatch&thit.id=NMCWebModelsMediaDocumentFile/5b9316b2-4f1f-4e03-97b6-52a3669c29ca&thit.pos=2913

In 2023, we became aware of anomalies in the data of a third-party testing centre, the Yunnik Technologies Test Centre in Nigeria. Investigations determined that the overall pattern of test-taking was statistically significantly quicker than at other test sites. We invalidated all tests taken at the site (affecting 1,995 individuals) and where we had concerns that someone had achieved their test score fraudulently, we took the following action:

It's complete and utter lunacy, isn't it?

Thank you for recognising this and explaining it better than me.

”crowded crime-ridden country”
Another tedious generalisation, overall crime rates in the UK are falling, some parts of the UK may feel overcrowded especially in the SE but many aren’t. I accept this maybe the case where you live and I’m sorry you feel like this it must be awful but it certainly isn’t the case where I and many many others live.

As a nurse, I’d say it is different with doctors though. A person has to be more academically clever to get into medicine in any country. Overseas doctors are also proportionately more likely to have come from a wealthier family and had a better education. They are less likely to hold extreme views such as a belief in witchcraft/demons affecting health and that FGM is a good thing.

The requirements for entry to nursing school are less and for carers, practically non existent. It’s seems anyone who can repeat the same old “I care” schpeel and become a carer in the UK and have access to some of our most vulnerable people.

There is nothing racist about prioritising UK doctors and nurses for jobs. They are a very racially diverse group.

Everyone should write to their MP about it. Mine didn't want to take my point on board. She agreed with me there should be more training places. That's true but not the main point. We could triple the training places and still not have enough if any doctor anywhere on the planet can apply for them on the same basis as the young people who already live here.

I worry that this nonsense and incompetence on the part of the government and wider establishment will help Nigel Farage get voted in. I fear he hasn't changed too much from the teenager who sang nazi songs and bullied jewish and asian classmates and we will get a facist and a racist as our next prime minister.

@Youdontseehow say that only a minority of good overseas nurse and carers are working. Are you including European trained nurses in that? It just seems unlikely to me that a majority of foreigners are poorly trained. Other countries have functioning health systems as well.

Most overseas nurses are from India and the Philippines. My experience is that they have excellent training.

Yanbu
Its a fucking disgrace.

My friend is a consultant anesthesiologist. She told me about this recently.

she also told me her dept needs 4 more consultants but theres no funding for roles. So now... they pair operations and give registrars the easier ones in a theatre opposite the consultant who ostensibly "oversees" both 😵‍💫

My friend said its literally just a matter of time until people start dying.

The international applications are a problem too. One of her cpworkers was on shift whe it opened and by the time the shift finished it was closed for applications due to volume of applicants.

Theres no reason they cant or shpuldnt change this system and prioritise uk applicants

All I can say is, I would willingly give my left arm to be seen by a decent gynae right now. So it’s beyond a joke that there isn’t “enough jobs” because there’s certainly enough need for it!
My close relatives husband trained as a pharmacist, because he knew jobs were scarce but he’s ended up doing a GPs job anyway and prescribing all sorts because he has the relevant medical training.
The whole thing is ass-backwards and we need less middle management and more people with actual medical training on the ground, in hospitals, pharmacies and GP surgeries!!

And this is why thousands of British young doctors are being left unemployed despite the huge debts they have incurred and the huge cost of their train8ng to the tax payer - because suggesting British qualified and resident doctors should prioritised over overseas applicants is met with cries of ‘Racism!’