Foundation Doctor's 2023 Guide to West Midlands Central

Updated for 2023 Applicants

West Midlands Central Foundation School is part of Health Education England West Midlands and is a small and competitive deanery around Birmingham. It composes several DGHs with surprisingly high acuity and notoriously excellent teaching, focused around a major city. It has at its heart the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, an enormous major trauma centre with world-leading transplant and intensive care medicine, plus military links leading to some of the most interesting of cases in the country. Despite the draw of this central hub, all the hospitals are busy, but you might find more teaching and support in the district general hospitals.

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Join The Facebook Group

You can Join the West Midlands Central Foundation School page here, plus the group for all UKFP 2023 trainee's here

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Foundation School Statistics

2022 F1 Places: 195
2022 F1 Applicants: 254
2022 Competition Ratio: 1.30

2021 F1 Places: 180
2021 F1 Applicants: 266
2021 Competition Ratio: 1.48

Below is an interactive bar chart displaying the competition ratios, lowest entry scores, and the number of posts over the past 5 years.
Please note that the 2022 data for lowest entry score is not yet available, we will update this graph when it is.

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How Does West Midlands Central Compare To Other Foundation Schools?

Check out our article "What are the most competitive foundations schools?" for a full breakdown.

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Hospitals, Rotation Scores, CQC Ratings

In the chart below you'll find a list of hospitals attached the West Midlands Central Foundation School, and an average of their Rotation Scores from Messly’s Training Navigator. Each rotation is given a score out of 100, which is based on a weighted average of ratings given by Foundation Trainees in the 2022 GMC NTS. The national average Rotation Score is 62 for reference.

Colours correspond to the latest CQC rating of that hospital.

‍Disclaimer: Please note that hospitals are unscored when there are insufficient responses by Foundation Trainees to the GMC’s NTS survey.

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Need Help Ranking Your Foundation Programmes?

Rank your Foundation Programme rotations with confidence with Messly’s Training Navigator. See how rotations are rated by last year’s foundation trainees to make smarter decisions about where you’ll spend your Foundation Training.

You can use it to answer questions like:‍

👉  Which are the best-rated and worst-rated rotations in my Foundation School?
👉  How do the rotations compare for Workload, Learning and Satisfaction?
👉  Which is the best hospital for my favourite specialties?
👉  Within a hospital, which rotations are best-rated?

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A Doctor’s Experience

“I chose Birmingham as I had lived in London my entire life and found even the DGHs to be under pressure due to patient numbers and short staffing. Even as a medical student I often felt like I was being used as service provision but I still wanted exposure to the large numbers of patients that a city brings. Birmingham seems to have much better staffing levels and the pay to cost of living ratio is almost a different planet compared to London. Birmingham is an amazing city, it has all the cultural draws of a major city, great nights out, great pubs and restaurants, plus it is surrounded by countryside. The price of living is far lower than further south but it’s still only 90 or so minutes to London by train or road. Digbeth is a trendy hub with dining clubs, plastic free supermarkets and bars, a lot of the doctors and students live around Sellyoak or Harbourne which are full of great gastro pubs and big houses for sharing cheaply- housing conditions seem to be pretty good, no drafty student digs and mouldy cupboards sold as bedrooms in sight.

The mess for Birmingham is great, summer, winter balls, Halloween parties, plenty of dry and wet events, plus pizza Fridays and while the messes themselves are variable they are perfectly serviceable.

It’s a small deanery around a major city, the buses, trams and trains are all good enough to get you anywhere you need to go, but most people choose to live nearer their hospitals, which is definitely recommended- it’s a big city to get across. QE parking is often complained about but there is enough parking, you might just have a bit of a walk from the car. All other hospitals are very car friendly.”

Katie Brill, Foundation Year 1 Doctors, Sandwell General Hospital

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