Bill prioritising UK medical graduates to be introduced to Parliament this week

Legislation prioritising UK medical graduates for foundation and specialty training will be introduced to Parliament tomorrow (Tuesday), the Department of Health and Social Care has said.

The Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill will set out plans to introduce a system of prioritisation for allocation of medical training places and will be introduced to Parliament tomorrow afternoon.

DHSC said that the legislation will aim to ‘address the choked recruitment system’ that ‘overlooks homegrown talent’, by prioritising UK and Ireland medical graduates and doctors who have worked in the NHS for ‘a significant period of time’ for specialty training.

UK and Ireland graduates would also be prioritised for foundation training, DHSC confirmed.

The Government pledged to prioritise UK medical graduates for specialty training as part of the 10-year health plan last year, and said that it will ‘reorientate’ the focus of NHS recruitment away from its dependency on international recruitment.

The plan also said that over the next three years, it will create 1,000 new specialty training posts ‘with a focus on specialties where there is greatest need’.

Health secretary Wes Streeting is expected to speak about the introduction of the Bill during tomorrow’s oral parliamentary questions.

Commenting on the Bill’s introduction, he said: ‘British taxpayers spend £4bn training medics every year, so it makes little sense for many of them to then be left struggling to get speciality training places and fearing for their futures.

‘The catastrophic mismanagement of the system by the previous administration has left UK graduates competing with doctors from around the world, with applicants rising from 12,000 in 2019 to nearly 40,000 this year.

‘To protect our investment and give them a path to become the next generation of NHS doctors, we are taking a number of measures including today introducing a Bill to prioritise graduates from UK medical schools for specialty training places. We are bringing this forward now so that it will be in place for this year’s applicants. 

‘Our NHS will never exclude international talent – and these changes will also prioritise doctors from overseas who have worked in the NHS for a significant period – but this will restore our home-grown medics to the level playing field they deserve and ensure a sustainable medical workforce in the NHS.

‘Together with our increase in the number of specialty places, instead of four resident doctors competing for every training post nationally, it will now be fewer than two resident doctors for each place.’

Prioritisation for UK medical graduates has previously been backed by the BMA, with doctor leaders voting in favour of guarantee all UK medical school graduates a foundation programme post for all future recruitment cycles, as well as offering UK graduates specialty training posts first.

BMA UK resident doctor committee chair Dr Jack Fletcher said that today is ‘a step forward’ to fixing the jobs crisis for doctors, but there remains progress to be made on giving resident doctors in the UK confidence the Government can ‘fully solve the absurd jobs crisis‘. 
  
He said: ‘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.’ 
 
But he said that the BMA is concerned about the effect on doctors with significant NHS experience who originally qualified abroad.

He added: ‘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.’

It comes after the BMA’s resident doctors in England continued with industrial action last month over the unemployment crisis.
  
Dr Fletcher said: ‘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.’