Hundreds of junior doctors are likely to be left without jobs when their contracts end next week, the British Medical Association said yesterday.
The stiffest competition for posts in years has left many doctors considering leaving the country, abandoning the profession or claiming unemployment benefit, the association said.
Other doctors would make do with jobs outside career training schemes endorsed by medical royal colleges, or sign up with agencies to get locum work.
The BMA has written to Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, to try to sort out the problems, which it blames on increased demand and poor NHS planning.
Numbers at medical school have increased, as have applications from overseas doctors, but the number of training posts in hospitals has not kept pace, said the association.
The bottleneck in training, when doctors decide which specialisms they want to pursue, comes as the entire system faces reform. Senior house officers, the mid-training grade, are said to be facing most of the problems.
The BMA said that adverts for posts in its employment section BMJ Careers, had fallen by 50% over three years. More than 200 doctors were applying for every training post, with some jobs attracting more than 1,000 applications.
Simon Eccles, chairman of the association's junior doctors committee, said: "The situation is far worse than anyone expected. We keep hearing from doctors who've been turned down and now have no idea what they're going to do.
"It makes no sense that at a time when the country is short of fully trained medical staff, we're pushing doctors into unemployment. It costs around a quarter of a million pounds to train a doctor to this level. A lot of talent and taxpayers' money is going to waste."
One in three of 276 first-year doctors who responded to a BMA website survey said they had not been offered a job to start next week.
There are about 49,000 junior doctors in the UK, as well as 5,300 first-year house officers, 24,500 senior house officers and 19,200 registrars. Most house officers get six-month contracts.
William Birts, 25, who was seeking a post after returning from a year working in Australia, said: "I have been applying since March and have probably done over 30 applications to get on a training programme for surgery. It is like winning the lottery to even get an interview at the moment. I have had one, but unfortunately I did not get the job. It is really worrying."
Imran Zakria, 28, who has been working at St Mary's hospital, Newport, Isle of Wight, trained in Pakistan. "It is clear there is a disaster coming." He had applied for about 500 jobs. "It is a miserable situation. At some big hospitals they ask for eight copies of CVs ... and they will discard applications if any are missing."
Preparing such forms took up to 10 hours a week, Mr Zakria said. "I started applying for my next job from February 5 this year. I am aware of two colleagues whose visas [will finish] on the same day their job finishes, if they do not find another post next week."
The Department of Health said it was taking the issue very seriously, although there had always been healthy competition for senior house officer posts, it said, particularly in popular areas such as London. It was aware that applications for most posts had risen this year and that this might mean doctors would not find work in their first choice hospital or speciality.
The BMA survey was "very small", the department said, but "we highly value our home-grown doctors in whose education and training we have invested heavily ..."
