COVID-19 has impacted Postgraduate Medical Education

The COVID-19 Postgraduate Medical Education Training Recovery programme has been leading and driving a system-wide effort to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on doctors in training and their educators.

Doctors in Postgraduate training are benefitting from a further £25m investment by Health Education England (HEE) during 2022/23 to support the continued recovery of medical training which is essential to service recovery and patient care. The financial investment last year achieved significant savings for the NHS, with reduced extension rates and increased support for trainee and educator wellbeing.

The Postgraduate Medical Education (PGME) Training Recovery Programme launched in 2020 to minimise the impact of the pandemic on the progression of England’s 55,000 doctors in postgraduate training, critical to managing the NHS care backlog. This year’s funding has been divided into £20m split regionally, based on the number of doctors in training programmes in each area to be used in the specialties where doctors are most at risk of falling behind in their training. The remaining £5m is being allocated for cross-regional and national interventions.

We have now developed the Training Recovery Toolkit aimed at Directors of Medical Education (DMEs), Training Programme Directors (TPDs), supervisors and other medical educators to illustrate the impact of interventions on training recovery and to encourage adoption of interventions. With this toolkit, we share real training recovery case studies that target multi-specialty-specific needs of doctors in training and their educators and provide key contacts at HEE who can help with queries about training recovery interventions and funding.