Responding to the announcement of the UK Government’s Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill that includes new legislation on UK medical graduate prioritisation, Dr Jack Fletcher, chair of the UK RDC, said:
“Today is a step forward to fixing the jobs crisis for doctors with this new legislation. However, there remains progress to be made on giving resident doctors in the UK confidence the Government can fully solve the absurd jobs crisis.
“This is a new policy of prioritising doctors trained in the UK for NHS jobs, which will come into effect across the four nations. This has the potential to reduce the number of doctors who can’t find work despite the state having spent time and money training them up.
“We are however concerned about the effect on doctors with significant NHS experience who originally qualified abroad. We’ve made clear that any change to specialty training post applications would need to protect and recognise those international doctors with significant NHS experience; something that this legislation does not go far enough on. We appreciate that the UK Government is finally moving with more urgency, using emergency legislation – which begins to recognise the scale of the critical jobs shortage doctors are facing.
"If patients are hoping this news will mean substantially more doctors on the wards to treat them, they will be disappointed. There remain no new jobs for doctors, and this alone will not put a dent in the massive gap between applicants – nearly forty thousand this year in England - and places. To fix the jobs crisis for doctors, we will still need thousands more genuinely new jobs - this is why doctors in England voted overwhelmingly in December to continue with industrial action over the jobs crisis in the NHS.
“The introduction of emergency legislation does give us some hope that this Government is finally waking up to the urgency of the situation. That said, we are also concerned that we need more doctors in our NHS. We are an under-doctored country – the NHS cannot afford to lose those doctors who have propped the system up for so long, and we must see genuine new investment in job roles to properly fix this jobs crisis."
Notes to editors
This legislation applies across the UK. Dr Jack Fletcher is chair of the UK RDC but represents only the RDC in England in the current dispute with Government over pay and jobs. The Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh RDCs represent the BMA in their respective nations.
The BMA is a professional association and trade union representing and negotiating on behalf of all doctors in the UK.