• Child Health Services
• Paediatrics

In 2020, across the world there were an estimated 65 million healthcare workers, including 13 million doctors.¹ Despite this seemingly huge workforce, roughly equal in size to the total population of the UK, the world’s population is currently 7.8 billion and there is an international shortage of healthcare staff, which in Europe alone is estimated at 1.8 million.² The WHO estimates that the global shortfall of healthcare staff will be 10 million by 2030.³

Inevitably, shortfalls have affected paediatricians, and the paper by Young June Choe and Kee-Hyoung Lee describes a precipitous fall in the number of paediatric trainees in South Korea.4 Other countries have also reported worrying trends where they struggle to recruit paediatricians into their healthcare organisations.5 The UK paediatric community and wider child health workforce cannot consider itself immune to these global workforce challenges. This editorial explores the challenges to recruitment to paediatrics and what is currently happening in the UK to address this.

There are considerable workforce problems in UK paediatrics; we need to train more doctors. It is wrong that postgraduate doctors in training across the UK are struggling to secure training places (the ratio of applicants to places has changed from 1.2:1 in 2019 to 3.3:1 in 20246), when there is an average deficit of 20% across Tier 1 and Tier 2 paediatric rota nationally. The UK needs to avoid a position where doctors, who have invested their time and money into training, are unable to get training posts in hospitals where they know there is a shortage of doctors. There is a rising risk of the NHS …