Half of trainee British doctors finishing this summer had no job lined up.
Yet the NHS is poaching foreign doctors.
One in six of Nigeria's are now in the UK.
The real scandal isn't pay: it's a broken training pipeline.
In 1957, just 12% of NHS doctors were trained abroad.
By 2024, it’s 42%.
We reject 16k med school applicants every year, then import 20k doctors from abroad.
“Unions never want this to be fixed because staff shortages increase their negotiating power,” one former health secretary tells me. “This crisis actually suits a lot of people.” But not the patients, the taxpayer or doctors — and this is how Wes Streeting could break the strike deadlock. Online chatrooms show doctors dismayed about the BMA’s obsession with salary, especially after Streeting’s pretty generous offer. Their main complaint, which the health secretary could and should address, is about the ten-year training pipeline.
https://archive.ph/z5uHa