§ Chris GraylingTo ask the Secretary of State for Health what research his Department has conducted into the reasons for different categories of acute hospital staff choosing to leave their professions. [91476]
§ Mr. HuttonThe Department has commissioned over many years and continues to fund a series of cohort studies of doctors' careers by the United Kingdom medical careers research group at the University of Oxford.
This research covers all doctors, not just those employed in acute hospitals. The objectives are:
799Wto determine the career choices of UK doctors at regular intervals after qualification and to study the factors that influence them;to study career progression at regular intervals, to compare it with earlier career choices and to determine factors that have influenced any change;to study and estimate the movement of doctors to work outside the national health service, to work in medicine outside the UK, or to leave medicine, and to identify factors associated with them;to ascertain the views of doctors about their work, training, career, working environment, and morale, and to compare these between specialties, grades, etc.;to use study findings to model and forecast future workforce supply;to consider the findings, to make recommendations about their interpretation and policy relevance, and to inform medical workforce planners and decision-makers about factors that have an important influence on medical careers and medical work.These studies, which are questionnaire surveys of all UK medical graduates, have been published most recently in the British Medical Journal on 28 September 2002.
The Department also funds the nursing research unit at King's College London to do similar work on nurses' careers.