UK health services could face major workforce gaps if the growing trend of internationally qualified doctors leaving the profession continues, the General Medical Council has warned in its latest report.
The State of Medical Education and Practice in the UK: Workforce Report 2025 reveals that 4,880 non-UK qualified doctors left practice in 2024, a 26% increase on the previous year’s 3,869. This marks the first significant year-on-year rise since the pandemic, following 3,968 departures in 2022 and 3,824 in 2021.
Doctors who qualified outside the UK currently make up around 42% of the medical workforce, making this trend a serious concern for health service resilience.
The report also highlights a levelling off in international recruitment. In 2024, 20,060 non-UK qualified doctors joined, only slightly up from 19,629 in 2023 – a much smaller increase compared to previous years.
Alarmingly, those who did join were less likely to secure employment. Of doctors who registered after passing the GMC’s exam for international joiners last year, only one in eight connected to a designated body within six months, compared to one in five in 2023 and one in four in 2021 and 2022.
General Medical Council Chief Executive, Charlie Massey, commented:
“Doctors represent a mobile workforce, whose skills are in high demand around the world. Internationally qualified doctors who have historically chosen to work in the UK could quite conceivably choose to leave if they feel they have no future job progression here, or if the country feels less welcoming. Any hardening of rhetoric and falling away of support could undermine the UK’s image as somewhere the brightest and the best from all over the world want to work.
“It is vital that workforce policies do not inadvertently demoralise or drive out the talent on which our health services depend. Doctors who qualified outside of the UK make up 42% of those working in the UK. If we see even a small percentage increase in them leaving, our health services will end up with huge holes that they’ll struggle to fill.”
The UK Government’s Ten-Year Health Plan for England, published earlier this year, prioritises UK medical graduates for postgraduate training places. While GMC Chief Executive Charlie Massey welcomed efforts to build a sustainable system, he warned that the impact on a workforce heavily reliant on international doctors must be considered.
This challenge is particularly acute in general practice, central to the government’s vision for neighbourhood health services, where half of first-year trainees in 2024 qualified outside the UK.
In response to the report, Chief Executive of NHS Employers, Danny Mortimer, said:
“The NHS is seeking to fairly balance the aspirations of UK graduates and the needs of colleagues who trained outside the UK, while at the same time advancing its long-term vision which ensures that more clinical care is delivered in neighbourhood and community settings.
“A number of workstreams are being taken forward which support these objectives, and the government has committed to creating more training roles for doctors and supporting international doctors into substantive roles within the NHS. Efforts to improve working conditions for resident and locally employed doctors will also have positive effects for both UK trained and internationally trained doctors working in the NHS.”
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