Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an estimate of the number of medical practitioners who leave the NHS after their foundation years to work in other countries in the latest period for which data is available.

The United Kingdom Foundation Programme (UKFP) has surveyed doctors finishing their second year of foundation training. The last iteration of the survey in 2019 showed that at the end of training, 635 out of 6,864 trainees or 9.3%, reported their planned next work destination as outside of the UK. However, it is expected that some of these trainees will return to practice in the UK.

The UKFP survey aligns with the latest information from the General Medical Council’s ‘The state of medical education and practice in the UK – the workforce report 2022’, which tracked the location of the 2016 cohort of doctors who completed their second year of foundation training. This shows that of 6,207 doctors who finished placements in England, only 387 or 6% had left the UK workforce after a year and 414 or 7% had left after five years. Those leaving may be working in other countries and also include those no longer working in the medical profession.