Doctors: Registration
(asked on 15th October 2014) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many doctors were registered to practise medicine by the General Medical Council (GMC) in the last five years; and how many of the first registrations with the GMC in each year were from doctors who gained their primary medical qualification in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom or rest of the world respectively.
The Department does not hold the information. This information is held by the General Medical Council and they have provided the information below for the purposes of answering this question.
The following table shows the number of doctors joining the register for the first time, from 2009 to 2013, by the region of their primary medical qualification and first registration year.
| No. of Doctors | ||||
2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | |
EEA | 2,368 | 2,973 | 2,726 | 2,899 | 3,062 |
Non-EEA | 2,579 | 2,959 | 2,437 | 2,222 | 2,379 |
UK | 6,876 | 7,010 | 7,112 | 7,083 | 7,451 |
Grand Total | 11,823 | 12,942 | 12,275 | 12,204 | 12,892 |
Source: General Medical Council
The following table shows the number of doctors on the register at the end of each year by the region of their primary medical qualification. The number of registered doctors who hold a licence at the end of each year is also provided. A licence in necessary to work as a doctor in the UK, but holding one does not guarantee that a doctor is working.
| EEA | Non-EEA | UK | |||
Year | No. of Doctors Registered | No. of Doctors Licensed | No. of Doctors Registered | No. of Doctors Licensed | No. of Doctors Registered | No. of Doctors Licensed |
2009 | 21,177 | 19,495 | 64,685 | 59,857 | 145,498 | 139,161 |
2010 | 22,757 | 21,174 | 66,001 | 61,422 | 150,465 | 144,042 |
2011 | 24,032 | 22,398 | 66,574 | 61,892 | 155,258 | 148,442 |
2012 | 25,529 | 23,305 | 67,092 | 61,297 | 159,890 | 151,597 |
2013 | 27,114 | 23,931 | 67,821 | 59,893 | 164,688 | 154,397 |
Source: General Medical Council
Notes:
1. Doctors will leave and re-join the register over the course of a year so the difference between each year end total will never be equal to the number of first time registrants in a year.
2. These tables exclude doctors who were registered with a status of “Temporary full registration for special purpose registrations”, which allows doctors to be registered for a temporary period in order to treat non-UK nationals within the UK. For example, we had a significant number of doctors who were registered temporarily in 2012 to accompany their national team to the Olympic or Paralympic games. The tables also exclude “Temporary full registration for visiting eminent specialists”. These registrations are for doctors visiting the UK for a temporary period to provide specialist knowledge and skills in a particular branch of medicine and cannot exceed 26 weeks in a 5 year period.