Exclusive: Black and Asian doctors are up to 30 times less likely to be offered medical training posts in some specialties, data show

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Data reveals that black and Asian doctors in the UK face significant disparities in accessing specialist medical training posts, with black doctors being up to 30 times less likely to receive offers in some specialties. This gap is particularly stark in anesthetics core training, highlighting ongoing inequalities in medical education.

Doctors from certain backgrounds are far less likely to be offered specialist training places in the UK than white candidates, new data suggest.But exactly how much of a gap black and Asian doctors face varies hugely across different specialties, in figures obtained by The BMJ.Across all specialties black doctors are four times less likely to be offered a training place than white applicants, official data from NHS England (NHSE) show.But in some specialties the gap is much wider, the starkest example being core training 1 (CT1) in anaesthetics. In this specialty black applicants stood less than a 1 in a 100 chance of being offered a place in 2024 and were 30 times less likely to be offered a place than white counterparts. Only 10 of 1158 black applicants received an offer, which compared with 7% of Asian applicants (111/1696) and a third of white applicants (556/1668).In general practice all...