Career progression and destinations, comparing men and women in the NHS: postal questionnaire surveys

Objective To study the career progression of NHS doctors, comparing men and women

Retention in the British National Health Service of medical graduates trained in Britain: cohort studies

Objective To report the percentage of graduates from British medical schools who eventually practise medicine in the British NHS

Early career choices and successful career progression in surgery in the UK: prospective cohort studies

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Changes to the structure of medical training worldwide require doctors to decide on their career specialty at an increasingly early stage after graduation. We studied trends in career choices for surgery, and the eventual career destinations, of UK graduates who declared an early preference for surgery.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Postal questionnaires were sent, at regular time intervals after qualification, to all medical qualifiers from all UK medical schools in selected qualification years between 1974 and 2005. They were sent in the first year after qualification, at year three and five years after qualification, and at longer time intervals thereafter.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Responses were received from 27 749 of 38 280 doctors (73%) at year one, 23 468 of 33151 (71%) at year three, and 17 689 of 24 870 (71%) at year five. Early career preferences showed that surgery has become more popular over the past two decades. Looking forward from early career choice, 60% of respondents (64% of men, 48% of women) with a first preference for a surgical specialty at year one eventually worked in surgery (p < 0.001 for the male-female comparison). Looking backward from eventual career destinations, 90% of responders working in surgery had originally specified a first choice for a surgical specialty at year one. 'Match' rates between eventual destinations and early choices were much higher for surgery than for other specialties. Considering factors that influenced early specialty choice 'a great deal', comparing aspiring surgeons and aspiring general practitioners (GPs), a significantly higher percentage who chose surgery than general practice specified enthusiasm for the specialty (73% vs. 53%), a particular teacher or department (34% vs. 12%), inclinations before medical school (20% vs. 11%), and future financial prospects (24% vs. 13%); and a lower percentage specified that hours and working conditions had influenced their choice (21% vs. 71%). Women choosing surgery were influenced less than men by their inclinations before medical school or by their future financial prospects.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Surgery is a popular specialty choice in the UK. The great majority of doctors who progressed in a surgical career made an early and definitive decision to do so.</p

Views of junior doctors about whether their medical school prepared them well for work: questionnaire surveys

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The transition from medical student to junior doctor in postgraduate training is a critical stage in career progression. We report junior doctors' views about the extent to which their medical school prepared them for their work in clinical practice.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Postal questionnaires were used to survey the medical graduates of 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2005, from all UK medical schools, one year after graduation, and graduates of 2000, 2002 and 2005 three years after graduation. Summary statistics, chi-squared tests, and binary logistic regression were used to analyse the results. The main outcome measure was the level of agreement that medical school had prepared the responder well for work.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Response rate was 63.7% (11610/18216) in year one and 60.2% (8427/13997) in year three. One year after graduation, 36.3% (95% CI: 34.6, 38.0) of 1999/2000 graduates, 50.3% (48.5, 52.2) of 2002 graduates, and 58.2% (56.5, 59.9) of 2005 graduates agreed their medical school had prepared them well. Conversely, in year three agreement fell from 48.9% (47.1, 50.7) to 38.0% (36.0, 40.0) to 28.0% (26.2, 29.7). Combining cohorts at year one, percentages who agreed that they had been well prepared ranged from 82% (95% CI: 79-87) at the medical school with the highest level of agreement to 30% (25-35) at the lowest. At year three the range was 70% to 27%. Ethnicity and sex were partial predictors of doctors' level of agreement; following adjustment for them, substantial differences between schools remained. In years one and three, 30% and 34% of doctors specified that feeling unprepared had been a serious or medium-sized problem for them (only 3% in each year regarded it as serious).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The vast knowledge base of clinical practice makes full preparation impossible. Our statement about feeling prepared is simple yet discriminating and identified some substantial differences between medical schools. Medical schools need feedback from graduates about elements of training that could be improved.</p

A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz

We conducted a search for narrowband radio signals over four observing sessions in 2020-2023 with the L-band receiver (1.15-1.73 GHz) of the 100 m diameter Green Bank Telescope. We pointed the telescope in the directions of 62 TESS Objects of Interest, capturing radio emissions from a total of ~11,680 stars and planetary systems in the ~9 arcminute beam of the telescope. All detections were either automatically rejected or visually inspected and confirmed to be of anthropogenic nature. In this work, we also quantified the end-to-end efficiency of radio SETI pipelines with a signal injection and recovery analysis. The UCLA SETI pipeline recovers 94.0% of the injected signals over the usable frequency range of the receiver and 98.7% of the injections when regions of dense RFI are excluded. In another pipeline that uses incoherent sums of 51 consecutive spectra, the recovery rate is ~15 times smaller at ~6%. The pipeline efficiency affects calculations of transmitter prevalence and SETI search volume. Accordingly, we developed an improved Drake Figure of Merit and a formalism to place upper limits on transmitter prevalence that take the pipeline efficiency and transmitter duty cycle into account. Based on our observations, we can state at the 95% confidence level that fewer than 6.6% of stars within 100 pc host a transmitter that is detectable in our search (EIRP > 1e13 W). For stars within 20,000 ly, the fraction of stars with detectable transmitters (EIRP > 5e16 W) is at most 3e-4. Finally, we showed that the UCLA SETI pipeline natively detects the signals detected with AI techniques by Ma et al. (2023).Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, submitted to AJ, revise

Rethinking the fall of the planter class

This issue of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, and funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this issue, to bring together scholars currently working on the history of the British West Indian planter class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to discuss how, when, and why the fortunes of the planters went into decline. As this introduction notes, the difficulties faced by the planter class in the British West Indies from the 1780s onwards were an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. The American historian Lowell Ragatz published the first detailed historical account of their fall. His work helped to inform the influential arguments of Eric Williams, which were later challenged by Seymour Drescher. Recent research has begun to offer fresh perspectives on the debate about the decline of the planters, and this collection brings together articles taking a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social histor

Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean

Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites to dominate and control the enslaved majority. By the end of the eighteenth century, British metropolitan observers had an entrenched opinion of Caribbean whites as gluttons. Travelers reported on the sumptuous meals and excessive drinking of the planter class. Abolitionists associated these features of local society with the corrupting influences of slavery. Excessive consumption and lack of self-control were seen as symptoms of white creole failure. This article explores how local cuisine and white creole eating rituals developed as part of slave societies and examines the ways in which ideas about hospitality and gluttony fed into the debates over slavery that led to the dismantling of slavery and the fall of the planter class

Low exposure long-baseline neutrino oscillation sensitivity of the DUNE experiment

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) will produce world-leading neutrino oscillation measurements over the lifetime of the experiment. In this work, we explore DUNE's sensitivity to observe charge-parity violation (CPV) in the neutrino sector, and to resolve the mass ordering, for exposures of up to 100 kiloton-megawatt-years (kt-MW-yr). The analysis includes detailed uncertainties on the flux prediction, the neutrino interaction model, and detector effects. We demonstrate that DUNE will be able to unambiguously resolve the neutrino mass ordering at a 3$\sigma$ (5$\sigma$) level, with a 66 (100) kt-MW-yr far detector exposure, and has the ability to make strong statements at significantly shorter exposures depending on the true value of other oscillation parameters. We also show that DUNE has the potential to make a robust measurement of CPV at a 3$\sigma$ level with a 100 kt-MW-yr exposure for the maximally CP-violating values \delta_{\rm CP}} = \pm\pi/2. Additionally, the dependence of DUNE's sensitivity on the exposure taken in neutrino-enhanced and antineutrino-enhanced running is discussed. An equal fraction of exposure taken in each beam mode is found to be close to optimal when considered over the entire space of interest

A Gaseous Argon-Based Near Detector to Enhance the Physics Capabilities of DUNE

This document presents the concept and physics case for a magnetized gaseous argon-based detector system (ND-GAr) for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) Near Detector. This detector system is required in order for DUNE to reach its full physics potential in the measurement of CP violation and in delivering precision measurements of oscillation parameters. In addition to its critical role in the long-baseline oscillation program, ND-GAr will extend the overall physics program of DUNE. The LBNF high-intensity proton beam will provide a large flux of neutrinos that is sampled by ND-GAr, enabling DUNE to discover new particles and search for new interactions and symmetries beyond those predicted in the Standard Model