Our targets to address areas of inequality

Tackling discrimination and inequality in medicine is an urgent priority for everyone supporting the health services. It’s the right and fair thing to do. It’s also vital to helping retain doctors working in the UK and to support high quality patient care.

Using research and data, we’ve identified three areas of inequality which we and other organisations can work together to address. And we’ve set targets to help us all keep focused on creating long-lasting changes.

Targets for us as a regulator

We want to eliminate two areas of inequality affecting doctors. These are:

1. The disproportionate pattern of fitness to practise complaints we receive from employers, in relation to a doctor’s ethnicity and place of qualification.

We want to eliminate this by 2026. The number and rate of these referrals remains low. But ethnic minority doctors are twice as likely to be referred to us by their employer than white doctors. And doctors who gained their medical degree outside the UK are three times more likely to be referred to us than doctors who took their medical degree in the UK.

2. Discrimination, disadvantage and unfairness in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education and training.

We want to eliminate this by 2031. Data and research continue to show that rates of training and career progression in medicine are different when we look at different protected characteristic groups, particularly ethnicity. 

Targets for us as an employer

We also need to improve diversity and inclusivity in our organisation. So we’ve set targets for ourselves as an employer to:

• increase career progression for ethnic minority colleagues
• improve the representation of ethnic minority colleagues at all levels
• address gender and ethnicity pay gaps

Making progress

We’re working with organisations across the UK to create long-term improvements. Many positive changes are underway, but there’s still much more for us all to do. We’ve introduced a range of initiatives that have helped us make progress against our targets so far. They include:

• changing our fitness to practise processes, so we can better understand what steps employers have taken to make sure referrals are fair.
• supporting postgraduate training organisations, medical schools, and medical royal colleges to deliver their equality, diversity and inclusion action plans.
• introducing a new training programme to support ethnic minority staff at the GMC to meet their future career goals.