Operation employment: Why 1,000 of Britain's best young doctors may be out of work this year

More than 1,000 of Britain's brightest young doctors could fail to get jobs this year, the country's leading surgeon has warned.

Bernard Ribeiro said the chaos of last year's botched medical training system – when 29,000 junior doctors were chasing just 15,600 training posts – would this year affect doctors higher up the training ladder who hoped to become surgeons.

Junior doctors applying for registrar posts – which sees them training to become specialist consultants, orthopaedic surgeons and GPs – will be competing against around 20 other applicants for each job. With 1,600 set to graduate, that could mean 1,520 left searching for work.

Last year a minimum of just five were competing for each position.

Doctors who miss out on a training post cannot become consultants or GPs. Part of the problem is that this year UK doctors must also compete against doctors legitimately applying from abroad – after a High Court decision last November ruled that indigenous applicants could not be given priority.

And the Government's much-criticised online application system last year has also created a bottleneck, leaving junior doctors who left medical school two, three and four years ago competing to get on the same rung of the ladder.

It means those who failed to get a position last year will compete again this year with fresh applicants.

Mr Ribeiro, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said the Government had focused on getting young doctors straight from medical school into a job at the expense of those who had been in the training system for longer.

He called for an increase in the number of top consultant training posts so Britain's most talented medics would not be "cast adrift".

Mr Ribeiro said: "The huge challenge for Government is to make decisions on whether we should expand consultant numbers. There's a very good case for doing so. Patients increasingly want more specialist care delivered by consultants, not trainees."

Mr Ribeiro said there was a "SHO bulge" – a glut of senior house officers stuck half-way through their training.

The total number of doctors applying for the top posts this year is still not known – but he said the number of home-grown trainee surgeons who had passed college examinations and would be looking for jobs is around 1,600.

They would also be up against those applying from abroad, whose numbers are impossible to guess.

Each doctor costs British taxpayers around £250,000 to train and many are now being forced into other careers or abroad because they cannot find a job.

The total number of training posts available this year has also been cut from 15,600 to 9,000 because of changes introduced last year guaranteeing places to doctors who have already started their training.

The Department of Health said: "We will continue working with the medical profession to develop solutions to the problem and we have already created 165 more jobs."