🔗 Share this article

Unprecedented figures of internationally qualified physicians are quitting the UK, leaving the NHS at risk of huge shortages in its staffing, with hostility towards foreign workers being cited for the exodus.

Significant Increase in Departures

Altogether, 4,880 physicians who trained in another country left the UK during 2024 – a rise of 26% on the 3,869 who did so the year before – data from the General Medical Council reveal.

Healthcare executives, senior doctors and the GMC cautioned that increased criticism of and abuse directed at migrants in the UK was a significant reason for the increase in overseas doctors departing.

Sector Executives Express Concern

“It’s extremely worrying that so many well-trained and highly valued overseas physicians the NHS just cannot do without are leaving in their large numbers,” said Daniel Elkeles.

“We could not operate an NHS if we had not for many years recruited talented and valued individuals from overseas. The diversity of the NHS staff is one of its biggest strengths.”

Dr Amit Kochhar said: “Physicians who qualified abroad have for many years constituted a significant sector of the NHS workforce, and healthcare in the UK would have long since withered away without them.”

“But as we warned recently, a ongoing campaign of anti-migrant rhetoric is causing many physicians with a migrant background considering if it is worth staying.”

Political and Regulatory Reaction

Wes Streeting expressed concern this month that NHS staff were bearing the brunt of a return to historical racism in Britain where it is “socially acceptable to be racist”.

The rise in overseas doctors leaving occurred alongside a levelling-off in the number arriving to work in Britain, the medical regulator’s annual report on the state of medical education and practice in the UK for 2024 indicated.

Staffing Statistics and Trends

• Over twenty thousand who entered the UK physician database in 2024 were just slightly higher than the 19,629 who did so in 2023.
• This represented the lowest increase since 2020.
• The GMC’s results have raised concern because the NHS is so strongly dependent on doctors from abroad – 42% of its entire medical workforce trained overseas.

“Overseas-trained doctors who have traditionally chosen to work in the UK could very possibly decide to depart if they believe they have no future job progression here, or if the nation feels less welcoming,” said the GMC’s chief executive.

“Any intensification of discourse and falling away of backing could damage the UK’s image as somewhere the brightest and the best from all over the world would want to work.”

Employment Difficulties and Government Effects

The plateauing in foreign doctors arriving to the UK may be because such doctors are finding it harder to get a job, the GMC explained.

1. Just 12.5% who became registered in the UK last year “found a NHS post” – that is, secured a position within the NHS – within six months.
2. That was down on the one in five who did so in 2023 and one in four in 2022.

The lack in places offered for junior doctors to begin training in their selected specialty has prompted the government to allocate a greater share of them to UK-trained doctors.

But the GMC’s report warns policymakers that that approach, combined with the challenge of finding a job, may be misguided by deterring international physicians from relocating to the UK.

“It is crucial that staffing plans throughout all four [UK] countries do not inadvertently discourage or drive out the talent on which our medical system depend”, wrote Massey and the GMC chair.