A recent BMA report has estimated that doctors leaving the NHS prematurely costs the taxpayer up to £2.4bn a year. 15,000 to 23,000 doctors estimated to have left the NHS prematurely in England between September 2022 and September 2023.

Correlating to other figures provided by the Channel 4 News link below, approx. 5000 of those are new junior doctor graduates. We only produce 8000-9000 new doctors annually, so we are losing around 50% of our medical graduates each year.

All the while, demand is ever increasing with population growth driven by mass immigration.

Bearing in mind that despite tuition fees of £9000 annually in England, the cost of medical education is still heavily subsidized, and it is totally subsidized in Scotland. Hence the costs mentioned. The reasons for doctors leaving are myriad but can be broadly categorised into push and pull factors. The push factors include poor working conditions, e.g. pay, workload, regulatory practices, demonization in the media especially with GPs and societal/political factors like lack of protection of whistle-blowers, politicisation of the NHS. The pull factors include better working conditions abroad and a lesser degree of the push factors.

The mainstream political parties’ aims of recruiting more doctors (e.g. 5000 more doctors in last Tory manifesto) are clearly untenable without addressing any of our push factors. Any government would find it difficult to do so though, as socialised healthcare translates into trying to milk the workforce for as much as possible.

Greater spending just means greater debt and inflation. Trying to take the shortcut of recruiting foreign doctors’ risks exacerbating problems of immigration and integration and our pull factors pale in comparison to other nations. Harking back to my January article on healthcare models, whilst government spending could be more wisely used on priority areas, maybe it is time to ask if the taxpayer should continue to trust any government with healthcare provision beyond the bare necessities.

Dr Chris Ho

UK Independence Party spokesman for Health and Social Care