Should UK training programmes base doctors on one site for two years?

Issues affecting the recruitment and retention of junior doctors have been recognised for some time now, and further delay in demonstrable progress is difficult to justify. But to truly bend the recruitment and retention curve for the better, we may also need to confront an obstacle intrinsic to the way we train our doctors: the frequency with which trainees rotate through hospitals.

Despite the appearance of sympathy for junior doctors’ cause from senior medics and national governance bodies, there are those for whom junior doctors’ demands are simply born of millennial entitlement. While there may be elements of truth in this, it is an oversimplification. Frequent rotation between hospitals is not a new phenomenon for trainee doctors in the UK. But historical approaches to training benefited from important mitigating …