Many U.K. Trained Doctors Stay in National Health Service

And men and women found to choose similar career paths

WEDNESDAY, June 3 (HealthDay News) -- The majority of domestic medical students in Britain work in the National Health Service (NHS) after graduation, as do the majority of doctors from overseas who go to the country for training, with men and women choosing similar career paths, according to a study published online June 3 in BMJ.

Michael J. Goldacre and colleagues at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom analyzed data on 32,430 British medical school graduates and looked at their subsequent career paths from two to 27 years after graduation.

Two years after qualification, the researchers found that 88 percent of the male and female domestic graduates were working in the NHS, and the proportion of both men and women still working in the NHS remained between 80 and 90 percent at five, 10, 15 and 20 years. Of the overseas graduates, 76 percent were working in the NHS at the two-year mark and 72 percent were still there after five years, but, the authors note, by 10 years and 20 years the proportion of foreign doctors still working in the NHS dropped to 63 percent and 52 percent, respectively.

"From time to time, anecdotal evidence is put forward to suggest that doctors, disenchanted with the NHS, have started to leave it. Our evidence does not suggest that there was any period of time over the past 30 years when there was a sudden and substantial increase in loss of doctors from the NHS," the authors conclude.

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