Medicine is no longer staffed by men working full time in one specialty for 40 years

Where do our young doctors think they are going? Do they actually end up there? These questions have been posed by the Medical Careers Research Group in a series of cohort studies of British medical graduates since 1974. The career preferences of graduates from 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983 were examined about a year after qualification,1 and the results are compared with those from the 1993 cohort in a paper in this edition of the BMJ (p 19). 2

Planning the medical workforce has been a recurrent theme in Britain for over 50 years,3 with successive governments seeking to forecast demand and supply in the labour market for doctors. Britain now has a Medical Workforce Standing Advisory Committee, which has published two reports.4 5 And yet crucial questions still remain unanswered as the experts juggle figures and try to establish how many doctors we need to train …