Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether junior doctors who are on training programmes abroad and have been invited to interview by the NHS can submit their portfolios electronically and conduct interviews by Skype.

The Enhancing Junior Doctors’ Working Lives programme was established by Health Education England in March 2016, to improve the quality of life of doctors in training. This programme includes a specific workstream to make the recruitment process and subsequent deployment to training programmes more flexible for trainees applying from the United Kingdom and abroad.

Specialty courses who use the Multi-Specialty Recruitment Assessment (MSRA) as part of their selection process allow the test to be taken overseas, reducing the need to travel to the UK. For general practice and core psychiatry, applicants who reach the bypass score in the MSRA will progress directly to the offers stage, without the need to attend a selection centre.

HEE is in the process of re-developing its digital Oriel recruitment system for the 2021 recruitment round, which will go live in June 2020 and an electronic interface with e-portfolios has been proposed. Royal Colleges are each responsible for their own portfolio.

At present, HEE does not support Skype interviews of doctors in training as part of national selection due to a number of difficulties it would give recruiters and assessors, including verification of identity, replication of national processes and invigilation. Skype interviews are available for applicants with specific health requirements who are unable to travel.

Individual trusts are responsible for setting the application and recruitment processes to positions within that trust.