Jul 27 2005
Unemployment has become a serious threat to junior doctors, the British Medical Association (BMA) says today, as new figures indicate a shortage of training jobs for doctors.
Intense competition for posts has left many junior doctors (whose training costs around £237,000 each) without jobs to go to when their contracts end next Tuesday. Many are now considering leaving the country, abandoning the profession, or claiming unemployment benefit.
In a letter to Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt today the BMA says the problem is partly the result of increasing demand, and partly poor planning. Numbers of places at medical school have increased and applications from overseas are rising, but the number of postgraduate training posts has not increased at the same rate.
At the same time, many jobs have been phased out as a result of the new Modernising Medical Careers training structure. The government has said there has been no reduction in numbers of Senior House Officer (SHO) posts - the middle training grade for doctors. But new BMA research shows that the number of SHO jobs advertised in BMJ Careers - by far the main source of such adverts - fell by 50% between May 2002 and May 2005. On average, more than 200 junior doctors apply for every training post, with some jobs attracting over a thousand applications.
Commenting on the problem, Mr Simon Eccles, chairman of the BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee, says:
“The situation is far worse than anyone expected. We keep hearing from doctors who’ve been turned down for hundreds of jobs and now have no idea what they’re going to do. It makes no sense that at a time when the country is short of fully trained medical staff, we’re pushing doctors into unemployment. It costs around a quarter of a million pounds to train a doctor to this level. A lot of talent and taxpayers’ money is going to waste.”
The exact number of doctors who have been unable to find a job is not known, but more than one in three (37.7%) of the 276 first-year doctors who have responded to a survey on the BMA website said they had not been offered a post to start next week, and many more experienced doctors have also been unable to find a job.
Nearly nine in ten (87%) of the doctors surveyed said they were concerned about shortages of training posts in medicine, and nearly six in ten (58%) said they would consider going overseas to continue training if they were unable to find an accredited training post in the UK. One in three (32%) said they would consider leaving the medical profession altogether.
In its letter to the Health Secretary, the BMA calls for the government to address the issue by expanding numbers of doctors in higher specialist training and investing the necessary funding to accredit more posts for training.