Junior Doctors’ perception on the emerging and pressing issues on healthcare in Europe

Authors: Dr Alvaro Cerame, Dr Ellen McCourt, Dr Francisco Ribeiro

Background

Europe is facing a substantial deficit of healthcare professionals, particularly physicians. It is important to understand the perceptions of junior doctors (JDs) in order to address some of the emerging issues and to focus on effective retention policies.

Summary of work

A summary of the National Interim Report survey was gathered by the European Junior Doctors (EJD) during the year 2022. This survey which was answered by 24 National Junior Doctors’ Associations explores the importance of different topics for this collective in the continent.

Summary of results

EJD’s data gathered for the 2022 National Interim Report Survey shows that 63% of the surveyed organisations claimed that Medical workforce planning was an issue of the utmost importance, fort 25% very important and only 12% of countries mentioned it was not important. At the same time to the question: Is post-graduate training (i.e. choice of specialty, training conditions, quality, examinations) currently a problem or is it expected to be a problem within the next 5 years? The answer were: 21% utmost important, 50% very important, 17 % important and 12% less important. We also explored how important was going to be the topic of flexible working schemes in their countries: 50% claimed it was less important that the other topics. Free mobility was also considered as not important or less important in up to 50% of cases. Whereas salaries were considered to bean emerging issue for many Junior Doctors organisations.

Discussion and conclusion

Medical workforce planning is an emerging issue which is vital to almost every JD organisation. There is an important deficit of doctors producing gaps in the workforce fuelling excessive working hours and damaging wellbeing. Salaries are algo a big issue for European Junior Doctors. Lastly flexible working schemes occupy a middle positions while mobility is not currently expected to be a problem in the upcoming years.