23 September 2005
The Department of Health has rejected British Medical Association claims that thousands of junior doctors are out of work.
The BMA said it surveyed more than 2,300 junior doctors in the first two or three years of their careers. Of the 675 who replied, 65 had been unable to find work as a doctor in the UK. If these figures were applied to all junior doctors, up to 3,000 could be unemployed.
Around a third of those who had not found a job had given up on working for the health service. BMA junior doctors' leader Jo Hilborne said: 'These are people who are desperate to work for the NHS, and have spent years of their lives in training at a huge cost to the taxpayer… We should be doing everything we can to prevent their skills from being wasted.'
A Department of Health spokesman dismissed the BMA claims, saying that around 100 junior doctors who had completed their first postgraduate year had not found positions.
However, the BMA said it had been contacted by 300 unemployed juniors, independently of the survey.
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