Career equality for locally employed doctors

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan 20231 set out to expand the UK’s medical workforce and make it sustainable for the future. Within that workforce, one group that has been continually overlooked is locally employed doctors (LEDs).

NHS Employers uses the term LED to describe doctors who are not on nationally negotiated contracts.2 They generally have limited or no NHS postgraduate experience and are employed by individual NHS trusts on local, often short term contracts in a range of specialties. Across the NHS, LEDs are described with various titles such as clinical fellows, trust doctors, trust grade doctors, foundation year 3, or research fellows. Often they are referred to as non-training grade doctors,34 which leads to the erroneous assumption that they have no training needs. This has a negative effect on their career progression and restricts their opportunities for development.

LEDs are the fastest growing section of the UK medical workforce.5 Their numbers more than doubled from 11 046 in 2014 to 22 576 …