Junior doctor brain-drain ‘running sore’ for 30 years

Steps are planned to stop the ‘brain-drain’ of junior doctors after they complained that inadequate training, job insecurity and the lack of a structured career path was driving them abroad.

Measures include informing medical graduates in advance where they will be based during the six-month rotations they undertake in their first two years of on-the-job training, allowing qualified doctors family- friendly flexible working and tailoring specialist training to likely vacancies.

The moves come against a backdrop of shortages of non-consultant hospital doctors, or junior doctors, who are leaving the country in such numbers that more than 100 of their counterparts from Pakistan will have to be brought in here from next month to fill vacancies.