Post by Marwan Tahoun

1,000 training posts. Gone. 47,000 applicants. 13,000 posts. And it just got worse. On Tuesday, the government withdrew 1,000 specialty training places that were supposed to go live this month. The reason? The BMA strike starting on the 7th. So to recap: doctors were promised extra training posts, rejected a pay deal they felt was inadequate, and the government responded by taking the training posts away. Nothing says "we don't value our workforce" quite like that. Whether you support the strike or not, the maths hasn't changed. Applications have gone from 12,000 in 2019 to nearly 47,000 this year. And we've just lost 1,000 of the posts that were supposed to take the edge off. I went through this process myself. Using my whole annual leave in a rotation for exams, conferences and other portfolio related activities, and the government has decided to pull the rug from underneath us residents. The bit nobody warns you about isn't the competition itself — it's the hours you spend trying to piece together what's even required. Every specialty has different portfolio criteria, they're buried in different documents, and by the time you've found the right PDF, it's been updated and you're reading last year's version. It shouldn't be this hard to find out what you're aiming for. For those of you navigating specialty applications right now — what's been the most frustrating part? Not the competition itself, but the process of actually figuring out where you stand. Genuinely asking. Not rhetorically.