Statement by the Trainees and Members Committee on resident doctor training

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh's Trainees and Members Committee takes pride in representing our peers throughout their training. A number of recent events and reports lead us to be concerned about the ability of resident doctors to access high quality training to develop their skills and experience. 

Recruitment

It is our job as a College to advocate for all resident doctors who wish to join training programmes, as much as it is to support doctors currently in training.

We are dismayed by the increasing bottlenecks impacting resident doctors entering both Internal Medicine Training and Higher Specialist Training programmes. We are concerned that medical student numbers are due to increase without any concrete plans to increase training numbers accordingly.

With a finite number of training posts and rapidly increasing competition ratios, we strongly believe that graduates from UK medical schools should not be disadvantaged in recruitment processes for training posts. This is in-keeping with widespread practice in other nations. This would provide the increasing number of home-grown medical students the opportunity to put their skills and knowledge “back into the NHS” and afford some job security for medical students, who have spent thousands of pounds on their education as they progress through their career.

There is already significant evidence of burnout among resident doctors working in general medicine, and we are concerned that burdensome interview requirements on our junior colleagues will exacerbate this.

Supervision

The recent GMC State of Medical Education report highlighted that our medical educators are under immense pressure and are consistently under-resourced. With increasing numbers of medical graduates, this pressure could increase further. We believe that unprecedented investment in supporting educational supervision and developing a culture that facilitates this supervision will be key to delivering meaningful workforce expansion, therefore enabling high quality patient care into the future.

Call for Action

As we enter another challenging winter period, where resident doctors will be the backbone of our NHS, we call for further investment in training numbers and a robust, transparent review of recruitment and workforce planning for UK resident doctors.