The Student Room Group

Is there significant risk of not having a job after graduation?

Medical school spaces have increased by 1500 in the last few years, with 5 new medical schools opened their doors, all under the plan of Jeremy Hunt. And this year with the A level results fiasco, schools have to accept even more students over their planned capacities, which is totally accidental.

Will there be enough foundation jobs and latter specialist training opportunities for such a huge population of graduates 5 years down the road? I wonder why no students I know seem to be concerned?

What's your opinion?
Reply 1
Do you know where I can find out how many first year med students are there this year 2020-2021?
Reply 2
The Medical Schools Council has published a statement back in August, stating that they think that the failure rates may be higher in the next few years*. I think this could be used to "weed out" the extra students and balance the number of graduating final year students with FY1 posts.

And of course, we'll always have vacancies for GPs, A&E doctors and psychiatrists.

I wonder what is the usual attrition or failure rate? 5%? And do you still think there will be ANY vacancies at all for ANY specialty, given this huge jump in the number of students in one year? I would be interested to see the numbers and do some analysis.
Reply 3
Exactly with brexit and more health professionals and doctors leaving, there will definitely be space. The NHS is trying to increase the amount of GPs as well since it's kinda undersubscribed. There are GP surgeries all over the country that are having to close which means having to relocate patients. Also A&E departments are becoming full partly due to the fact that people with routine ailments are going there, since their local GP has no appointments. If anything more doctors are needed. It might be more of a case in the future if certain specialities are over subscribed, doctors could be trained as GPs with Special Interests or their new name GPs with Extended Roles.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/27/gps-surgeries-shutting-brighton-family-doctors
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/31/gp-surgery-closures-in-uk-hit-all-time-high-in-2018
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/07/record-number-gp-practices-close-nhs

https://www.rcgp.org.uk/training-exams/practice/general-practitioners-with-extended-roles.aspx
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/366/bmj.l4393.full.pdf
Reply 4
Thanks for the context and trying to put things into perspective .... what prompted me thinking was I read somewhere that this year, due to the covid fiasco, medical schools are stuck with an over subscription of 25% .... say if 5% of offer holders were eventually convinced to defer, you still have 20% more students than planned this year ... so let's say there are a total of 8500 originally planned spaces throughout the UK, 20% means 1,700 extra students which is no joke .... unless I am missing something in my analysis?

Original post by Flors
Exactly with brexit and more health professionals and doctors leaving, there will definitely be space. The NHS is trying to increase the amount of GPs as well since it's kinda undersubscribed. There are GP surgeries all over the country that are having to close which means having to relocate patients. Also A&E departments are becoming full partly due to the fact that people with routine ailments are going there, since their local GP has no appointments. If anything more doctors are needed. It might be more of a case in the future if certain specialities are over subscribed, doctors could be trained as GPs with Special Interests or their new name GPs with Extended Roles.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/27/gps-surgeries-shutting-brighton-family-doctors
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/31/gp-surgery-closures-in-uk-hit-all-time-high-in-2018
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/07/record-number-gp-practices-close-nhs

https://www.rcgp.org.uk/training-exams/practice/general-practitioners-with-extended-roles.aspx
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/366/bmj.l4393.full.pdf

Thanks for this. I appreciate and agree with your analysis of the 'big picture', but my curiosity is with how NHS and the government bureaucracy will practically handle the sudden big jump in terms of medical graduates in year 2025 .... will they act reasonably and create enough FY1 posts and specialist training posts to cope? Or they will say we don't have the budget and its not our fault ...
Reply 5
Thanks for sharing, I appreciate this. But I think we are possibly talking about two different years? I am talking about the 2020/2021 cohort, those who are currently in first year. Last August schools had their hands tied and had to accept a lot more students due to grade inflation as a result of no A-level. As you said for the current application cycle, there shouldn't be a big issue as school can simply up their requirement, so my whole discussion re: big jump in the number of students was for the 2020/2021 cohort, not for the 2021/2022 one.
Reply 6
Good point. I didn't know there is a gradual, small increase each year, I always thought the 1500 one time spike was all there was in terms of increase of space. Let's hope everything works out for the current cohort of students!
Reply 7
Interesting discussion here:

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3358
Reply 8
I just found these statistics from Office for Students UK website, for the year 2020 intake, there are 10,403 first year medical students in the UK (compared with 9,450 in year 2019) ..... so 10% increase (mostly unplanned) due to the covd19 A-level drama:

https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/funding-for-providers/health-education-funding/medical-and-dental-intakes/

Pardon my ignorance, can someone help me put things into perspective, any kind soul tell me whether an unplanned increase of 953 students is going to be a HUGE problem or not for future FY1 posts?
Reply 9
Thank you so much, I really appreciate your knowledge on this subject .... you are right that we do not know how many of the 953 increase are truly 'unplanned', my assumption was that the 1500 targeted increase (announced in 2016) was already met in 2019/2020, so maybe the intentional boom should be over by now ..... judging by the number of successful graduates vs the total number of Foundation posts you provided, it seems the government does try to provide a reasonable amount of posts for graduates, hope this tradition continues ...