Lucy Dunn Lucy Dunn

We need to stop junior doctors leaving the NHS

Credit: iStock

Quit your job, leave the country, move to Australia. This may once have sounded like a hastily-planned midlife crisis, but in 2023 these life plans are more representative of doctors’ across the country. Four in ten junior doctors plan to leave the NHS as soon as they can find another job, a survey by the British Medical Association (BMA) has found. 

The poll asked over 4,500 junior doctors about their plans for the future. A third want to leave the country within the next year to work abroad, Australia often being their number one destination. Over 80 per cent cited real-term pay cuts as the reason they wanted to leave the health service. A similar number referenced poor working conditions. 

This follows a recent BMA survey of 3,819 junior doctors in England, which found that 65 per cent of respondents have, over the last year, ‘actively researched’ leaving their NHS jobs. Nearly 80 per cent of this cohort ‘often think about leaving the NHS’.

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