Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many doctors applied for medical specialty training in each of the last five years; and how many training places were available in the same period.

Doctors undertake two years of foundation training after graduation, which is followed by a choice of core training programmes. Most of those in core training then apply for higher specialty training programmes.

For 2024, there were 4,177 applications across the 25 specialty training programmes that comprise medical specialty training, which came from 2,897 unique applicants due to doctors being able to apply to a number of different specialities when seeking specialty training posts. The number of unique applicants for prior years is not held by the Department.

The attached table shows the number of doctors who applied for training in the 25 individual specialty training programmes that comprise medical specialty training, along with how many training posts were available across the United Kingdom in each speciality, in each of the last five years.

This information is drawn from information published by NHS England on the Competition Ratios for all doctor training specialties each year, which is available at the following link:

https://medical.hee.nhs.uk/medical-training-recruitment/medical-specialty-training/competition-ratios