ArticleBMJ open2018
Retirement ages of senior UK doctors: national surveys of the medical graduates of 1974 and 1977.
Article in BMJ open, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Working life expectancy of physicians: the case of primary care physicians in Czechia.Human resources for health · 2025Article
- General practitioner workforce sustainability to maximise effective and equitable patient care: a realist review protocol.BMJ open · 2024Article
- How old is too old to work for physicians?Postepy dermatologii i alergologii · 2023Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo report on retirement ages of two cohorts of senior doctors in the latter stages of their careers.
designQuestionnaires sent in 2014 to all medical graduates of 1974 and 1977.
settingUK.
participants3695 UK medical graduates.
main outcome measuresRetirement status by age at the time of the survey and age at retirement if retired. Planned retirement ages and retirement plans if not retired.
resultsOf contactable doctors, 85% responded. 43.7% of all responding doctors had fully retired, 25.9% had 'retired and returned' for some medical work, 18.3% had not retired and were working full-time in medicine, 10.7% had not retired and were working part-time in medicine and 1.4% were either doing non-medical work or did not give details of their employment status. The average actual retirement age (including those who had retired but subsequently returned) was 59.6 years (men 59.9, women 58.9). Psychiatrists (58.3) and general practitioners (GPs) (59.5) retired at a slightly younger age than radiologists (60.4), surgeons (60.1) and hospital specialists (60.0). More GPs (54%) than surgeons (26%) or hospital medical specialists (34%) were fully retired, and there were substantial variations in retirement rates in other specialties. Sixty-three per cent of women GPs were fully retired.
conclusionsGender and specialty differences in retirement ages were apparent and are worthy of qualitative study to establish underlying reasons in those specialties where earlier retirement is more common. There is a general societal expectation that people will retire at increasingly elderly ages; but the doctors in this national study retired relatively young.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.