Resident doctors will 'continue to press the Government' on workforce planning, as latest data reveals a significant reduction in the competition ratios for specialty training places.
The BMA has said that many doctors will be 'sighing with relief' after figures published by NHS England show that competition for the priority group when compared to all have reduced by more than 50 per cent.
The dramatic reduction comes after emergency legislation was enacted this year prioritising UK medical graduates for specialty training places, as part of efforts to tackle long-standing bottlenecks in recruitment.
According to the data, the competition ratio for applicants in the priority group came to 1.86.1 with this figure projected to have been 3.69.1 had the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act not been implemented.
Confirmation of the cut in the competition ratios comes as applications to Round 1 of the recruitment cycles opens today, with additional training posts now included across 16 core and run-through training programmes, and 32 higher training programmes.
Alongside its legislation prioritising UK graduates, the Government has also pledged to introduce 4,500 specialty training places over the next three years, as part of the terms reached in resident doctor pay deal concluded in June.
PARR: Victory result of tireless campaigning
Welcoming the news that competition ratios for priority group residents have more than halved, BMA resident doctors committee chair Callum Parr said that the positive change had only been possible due to the tireless campaigning of thousands of resident doctors across 15 rounds of industrial action.
He added that while the reduction represented a vital step in the right direction towards addressing the crisis in training place shortages, sustainable improvement would only come if the Government committed to ‘a genuinely forward-thinking workforce plan’.
He said: ‘The competition ratio for training jobs has been skyrocketing for years, and seeing it easing is good news. There are doctors today who will be looking with a sigh of relief, as the bottlenecks that threatened to derail their whole career now looks far less intimidating. This policy will have secured the work of many doctors in the NHS for years to come.
‘It should not have needed strike action to achieve this, but this is a sign of what we can achieve when we organise: commonsense policy that works for patients and works for doctors.
‘With that said, we cannot plan our workforce on emergency legislation and confrontation. This was an improvised solution to an avoidable problem, and to avoid seeing these problems in the future we will need to effectively plan jobs for doctors right up and down the career pipeline. We will continue to press Government to bring forward a genuinely forward-thinking workforce plan.’