Rohit Chitkara could barely contain his excitement when he received a letter in the post one morning from University College London. He’d been accepted into one of the most competitive medical schools in the country, and his parents were delighted. His father, a surgeon, had warned him about the difficulties of a career in medicine, but Chitkara, who’d always had a knack for science, wanted a job where he could help people. Medicine seemed the perfect fit.

But just four years after graduating Chitkara, then 28, decided to leave the profession for good. He was exhausted with his life as a junior doctor; the long hours, high pressure and lack of appreciation from patients had become untenable. “People who have spent their whole lives dreaming of becoming a doctor are leaving,” he explains. “Every medical student now knows of a doctor who’s left.”

Chitkara is just one of thousands of junior doctors in the UK who has left the NHS in recent years, as health chiefs talk of a “brain drain” depriving hospitals of their talent. The General Medical Council reports that a quarter of young medics feel ‘burnt out’ by the strains of the job, according to a new 70,000-person survey, while in 2017, only 43 per cent of junior doctors stuck to their NHS career path after finishing their first two years of training, down from 71 per cent in 2011.