Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of the new junior doctor contract on the recruitment and retention of junior doctors.

Medicine is an extremely popular career choice and we expect that to continue.

The new contract for doctors in training will have a positive impact on the working life of doctors and on the training they receive. It introduces stronger safeguards to ensure doctors are not required to work long, unsafe hours, enforced through contractual obligations on employers and external scrutiny of those hours by the Care Quality Commission and the independent Guardian of safe working hours.