The state of medical education and practice in the UK

Foreword and executive summary

In our foreword, our Chair, Dame Clare Marx, and Chief Executive, Charlie Massey, explain why we and healthcare organisations must respond to the data in this year’s report.

Our Executive summary highlights the key findings in this year’s report. It shows how we’ll work with healthcare organisations to maintain high standards of patient care in the face of ongoing pressures.

Supporting a profession under pressure

This chapter presents the context in which doctors are working and training. It explains why healthcare organisations should protect doctors’ wellbeing and provide them with flexible career options, for the benefit of patient care.

Wellbeing and retention of doctors

This chapter uses findings from a new survey, to explore how workplace pressures affect doctors across different roles and specialties. It also identifies factors that can encourage positive wellbeing for doctors, such as team working and supportive leadership.

The state of medical education

In this chapter, we explore doctors’ experiences of medical training. It draws on the feedback we gather every year in our national training surveys for trainees and trainers across the UK. This year’s results show that doctors who paused their training after foundation year two were, on average, at less risk of burnout.

Primary care

This chapter explores GPs’ workplace experiences, the challenges they face and how we can support the future of primary care. It includes new analysis on the results of three surveys of GPs we’ve commissioned since 2018.

Impact on patient care

In this chapter, new research shows how system pressures are affecting patient care. It explores the findings from a study of patients' views and experiences of referrals to other healthcare services.

Clinical leadership

This chapter presents findings from independent research on everyday clinical leadership. It highlights how supportive leaders have a positive impact on doctors’ personal and professional development, as well as patient care.

What needs to be done

This chapter focuses on how we will work with healthcare organisations to address the challenges and opportunities highlighted in this year’s report. Our data highlights five priority areas for action:

• Increasing the size of the medical workforce
• Making education and training more flexible
• Improving workplace cultures and wellbeing
• Joining up regulation across the UK’s health services
• Multi-professional working

Data tables

This year we are again publishing online a large set of reference tables, which summarise the source data used as the basis for many parts of this year’s report. These tables comprehensively cover our data relating to the register, medical education, and fitness to practise.  

Reference tables

To gather the insight needed for the 2019 SoMEP report, we asked independent research agency IFF research to find out UK doctors’ views on:

• changes in doctors’ career intentions
• experiences in the workplace
• the effects of working in pressurised environments.

This data allowed us to better understand the state of medical practice in the UK, and informed large parts of this year’s report.