Ethnic diversity of NHS doctors

Medicine is a high-paid and high-status career. It is also a big profession - and expected to grow considerably over coming decades. Understanding differences in access to medical careers by ethnicity, and different career paths within medicine by ethnicity, is therefore an important and interesting part of understanding the labour market experiences of people from different ethnic backgrounds more generally. There is also a growing evidence base (albeit largely from the United States) showing that non-White patients treated by a doctor of the same ethnicity as them experience better health outcomes. For both these reasons, the ethnic diversity of doctors working in the NHS matters. In this report, we use the Electronic Staff Record (ESR), the monthly payroll of all staff directly employed by NHS organisations, to examine the ethnicity mix of doctors working for the NHS in England and highlight differences across types of roles, gender and country of medical training.