Overseas-trained doctors leaving the UK in record numbers | NHS
A record number of overseas-trained doctors are leaving the UK, leaving the NHS at risk of facing major gaps in its workforce; Hostility towards immigrants is responsible for migration.
Figures from the General Medical Council reveal that 4,880 doctors qualified elsewhere will leave the UK in 2024; a 26% increase from the 3,869 doctors who did so the previous year.
NHS leaders, senior doctors and the GMC have warned that the increasing disparagement and abuse of immigrants in the UK is a major reason for the increase in the departure of foreign medics.
“It is truly worrying that so many highly skilled and highly valued international doctors are leaving in droves that the NHS cannot afford to lose,” said Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of hospital group NHS Providers.
“We wouldn’t have an NHS if we didn’t recruit talented and valuable people from all over the world over many years. The diversity of the NHS workforce is one of its great strengths.”
President of the representative body of the British Medical Association, Dr. Amit Kochhar said: “Doctors trained abroad have long formed a significant part of the NHS workforce, and without them medical care in the UK would long since have vanished.
“But as we warned last month together with other unions“The sustained campaign of anti-immigrant rhetoric is causing many doctors with immigrant backgrounds to consider whether it is worth staying.”
Health Secretary Wes Streeting this month voiced alarm that NHS staff are bearing the brunt of a return to 1970s and 1980s-style racism in Britain, where it is “socially acceptable to be racist”.
A rise in the departure of overseas doctors has coincided with a stabilization in the number of people coming to work in Britain, according to the medical regulator’s annual report on the state of medical education and practice in the UK to 2024. The 20,060 people who joined the UK medical register last year were just a few of the 19,629 who joined in 2023, representing the smallest increase since 2020.
The GMC’s findings have raised concerns because the NHS is heavily reliant on doctors from other countries; 42% of the entire medical workforce was qualified abroad.
Charlie Massey, chief executive of the GMC, said doctors were a “mobile workforce” with skills in demand around the world.
“Internationally qualified doctors who have historically chosen to work in the UK are likely to choose to leave if they feel they will not advance their work here in the future, or if the country becomes less welcoming,” he said.
“Hardening rhetoric and declining support could damage the UK’s image as a place where the brightest and best from around the world want to work.”
Last month the Royal College of Nursing highlighted a recent huge increase in the number of nurses experiencing racist abuse at work.
The GMC said the stagnation in the number of foreign doctors coming to the UK could be due to such medics having difficulty finding work. Statistics showed that only one in eight people registered in the UK last year were “affiliated with a designated agency” (i.e. held a post in the NHS) within six months. The rate was lower for one in five people doing so in 2023 and one in four in 2022.
A shortage of places available for early career doctors to begin training in their chosen medical specialty has led the government to allocate more doctors to trained paramedics in England.
But the GMC’s report warns ministers that this approach, combined with the difficulty of finding work, could be misguided by deterring doctors abroad from moving to the UK.
“It is vital to implement workforce policies in all four areas.” [UK] Countries are not inadvertently demoralizing or pushing out the talent on which our health services depend,” wrote Massey and GMC president Prof Carrie MacEwen.
