Training bottlenecks and unemployment—bad for doctors, patients, and the public purse
Competition for postgraduate medical specialty training posts is causing widespread despair and anger among the UK’s resident doctors (doi:10.1136/bmj.r1023 doi:10.1136/bmj.r1166).12 Applicant ratios for specialty training posts have been rising since 2019 and in some specialties doubled between 2022 and 2024 (doi:10.1136/bmj.r742 doi:10.1136/bmj.q2366).34 The BMA estimates that 20 000 doctors will miss out on a specialty training post this year (doi:10.1136/bmj.r742).3 This risks doctors being unemployed, working in non-training posts or as locums, or being prompted to leave the NHS or medicine entirely. It is “an abject failure of medical leadership,” says David Oliver, not to have foreseen and mitigated a situation that was entirely predictable (doi:10.1136/bmj.r1180).5 It has echoes of workforce and training problems of many decades past, so why haven’t we learnt from those mistakes, he asks? Without “urgent remedial action” we’re putting young people’s futures and the sustainabili
