A report from the Chief Medical Officer for England has argued that Britain should focus on hiring doctors who are trained natively rather than importing migrants to work in the National Health Service.
The Medical Training Review, led by coronavirus lockdown chief Professor Chris Whitty and former National Medical Director Professor Sir Stephen Powis, said that reform to NHS recruitment is a “matter of urgency” given the difficulty facing British-trained doctors finding good jobs in the UK amid increasing competition from abroad.
“Getting the right balance between domestically trained graduates, international graduates with experience in the UK and new international graduates is an important issue of policy, and the recent major changes to these ratios have contributed to some of the bottlenecks in training,” the report found.
“We cannot shy away from addressing this issue, while supporting the excellent international graduates in the NHS providing patient care.”
It comes as the number of British medical graduates seeking jobs has hit a record high this year. Meanwhile, there is also a record number of foreign doctors joining the medical register, increasing from 47 per cent in 2017 to 68 per cent in 2023.
While NHS trusts were previously mandated to prioritise British medical graduates, the requirement was paused in 2019 and fully scrapped under the supposedly Conservative government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021 when he enacted post-Brexit immigration reforms, which counter to the wishes of the public opened up the country to even more migrants.
This has coincided with many junior doctors deciding to move abroad from the UK, particularly to Anglosphere nations like Australia, which the British Medical Association (BMA) previously described as an “exodus”.
Critics of the current immigration-dependent model have noted that it not only serves to drain talent and skills from developing countries badly in need of medical professionals, but also squanders the massive investments made into training British doctors.
Director of research and policy at the Nuffield Trust health think tank, Dr Becks Fisher, told The Telegraph that on average it costs around £244,700 for a person to complete medical school in Britain and therefore “it’s sensible and cost effective to try to ensure that these domestically trained doctors go on to find jobs in a medical specialty and carry on working within the NHS.”
Alex Baylis, of the King’s Fund think tank, added that the system needs to be changed so that Britain is “not reliant on other countries to train doctors for us and also to get a return on the investment of the hundreds of thousands of pounds it costs to train the doctor”.
He said that the current situation has been “plagued by short-term thinking and not thinking through the full implications of how to join up health service policy requirements with immigration policy requirements”.
The findings of the undercut the frequent narrative put forward to justify mass migration into Britain, with open borders proponents often claiming that the National Health Service would crumble without migrant workers.
Additionally, despite the influx of foreign doctors, the socialised healthcare system has been overwhelmed in recent years, in part as a result of the millions recent arrivals under Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration liberalisations. As of October, the waiting list stood at a staggering 7.41 million cases, with 2.89 million having been waiting to see a GP for over 18 weeks, and 191,500 waiting over a year.
Chairman of the BMA resident doctors’ committee Dr Jack Fletcher remarked that said there is a problem with British “doctor unemployment while patients can’t even see a GP”.
“The Government should be prioritising UK graduates and international doctors with significant experience in the NHS for jobs as a fair and effective way to address the workforce crisis.”
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