Train British doctors

British doctors have launched a campaign to give British medical graduates priority when applying for speciality training, after two years employment in foundation doctor posts.

Applications for the limited number of speciality training posts from international medical graduates have increased from 10,402 in 2023 to 20,803 in 2025.

Insecure

Specialty training is the long path, through extensive training and experience in one’s chosen field, to work at consultant level in hospitals or as a fully qualified GP. Though desperately needed, doctors who do not secure a training post will end up unemployed, or at best on fixed-term insecure appointments as locally employed doctors.

Graduates from British medical schools have experience of the NHS, and have received investment from the British taxpayer, yet face an uncertain future. Yet at the same time the now abolished NHS England ran medical recruitment campaigns in India, Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan, among others.

Priorities

The BMA Resident Doctors Committee represents those in specialty training posts, previously known as “junior hospital doctors”. In early March, it demanded that the government, the NHS and statutory education bodies implement a recruitment process that lawfully prioritises medical graduates from British medical schools.

The BMA says, “it is essential that doctors trained in UK medical schools should be able to progress their careers in the UK”. They also call for an expansion of the number of speciality training posts, a call echoed by some of the medical royal colleges, for example the Royal College of Anaesthetists, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and the Royal College of Surgeons of England.