The government, as the main employer of doctors in the United Kingdom, is responsible for planning the medical workforce proficiently in order to deliver patient care. This requires it to model demographic trends, specialty needs, skill mix, technological change, and resource consequences. However, its manifest failure to plan efficiently does not create the responsibility or need to guarantee medical graduates employment.

Doctors cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to train. This training gives them specific skills as well as transferable skills. The training expenditure is a sunk cost—that is, once spent it cannot be retrieved. If medical graduates are unemployed this loss can be mitigated by their finding employment in other sectors of the economy, just as graduate lawyers do if they are unable to find jobs after academic and practical training.

Medical graduates, like all other graduates, …