Figures have revealed that there are currently 791 medical graduated waiting on the NHS reserves list to begin their training as a junior doctor.
The UK Foundation Programme (UKFPO) announced in December last year that there were 9,275 applications, 1,508 more than the number of Foundation places usually available.
The Foundation Programme (FP) has now been oversubscribed for the past several years despite recent statistics from NHS Digital suggesting that the NHS is short of around 8,000 doctors in England alone.
Placements for medical graduates are in shorter supply than aspiring medica who are in need of those placements, causing concern for how this will affect medical students.
Dr Julia Grace Patterson, Founder and Chief Executive of EveryDoctor, a doctor-led campaign organsiation, has begun a petition on twitter to encourage Health Secretary Sajid Javid to look at the placement structure to allow all waiting medicine graduates to begin their foundation training at the earliest possible moment.
Our NHS is missing nearly 8,200 doctors in England alone 👩⚕️
— EveryDoctor (@EveryDoctorUK) March 20, 2022
But our government has told 791 would-be junior doctors there’s no job for them 😡
Ask Sajid Javid to #GiveDocsJobs, add your name to 10,000+ others now! 👇 https://t.co/W4NkEuGRc0
So far nearly 11,000 people have signed the petition which will send the following letter to the Health Secretary:
To: Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This week it was revealed that 791 medical graduates could lose their chance to become NHS doctors this year - in spite of the crippling workforce crisis our NHS faces.
Our health service is in a state of emergency. In England alone, 6.1 million patients are waiting for treatment and the NHS is currently short of 8,158 doctors.
NHS staff are completely overworked; more than half are thinking of quitting, and the number of GPs in permanent roles has fallen by 6.6% in 5 years. So why have almost 800 would-be junior doctors been denied a place on a foundation training programme?
We desperately need new doctors to enter the workforce and yet hundreds of eligible graduates have been left sitting on the sidelines.
Will you agree to #GiveDocsJobs today and tell every eligible medical graduate waiting on a reserve list that there’s a place on a foundation training scheme for them? These jobs must be funded centrally, by the government. Patients deserve better, and our workforce urgently needs to grow and be supported.
Yours sincerely,
The UKFPO is only funded for s et amount of foundation posts per year but is said to be working with government departments to increase these positions to stop the reserve list growing.
All 791 applicants currently waiting on the reserve list will be allocated to a Foundation School in April 2022, however according to the UKFPO seven percent of applicants withdraw before beginning their FP, a figure which is expected to repeat itself this year.
