PARAMEDIC PROFESSIONAL BODY WARNS GOVERNMENT’S ‘GRADUATE GUARANTEE’ IS DEEPLY CONCERNING AND SHORT-SIGHTED
Paramedics are facing a serious graduate employment crisis, with up to 40% of 2025 graduates at risk of being unable to find a job.
These shocking new figures come at a time when the Government has just announced its ‘Graduate Guarantee’ for newly qualified nurses and midwives; a move which has been described as ‘deeply concerning’ and ‘short-sighted’ by the College of Paramedics.
While the College of Paramedics fully supports measures to help newly qualified nurses and midwives into safe, meaningful NHS roles through the Government’s new ‘Graduate Guarantee’ it is unacceptable to design policy for one profession without considering the impact on others.
Chief Executive of the College of Paramedics, Tracy Nicholls OBE said: “We are deeply concerned that this package has been developed without transparent, cross-professional workforce modelling and without addressing the acute employment pressures facing allied health professions, particularly paramedics.”
The College of Paramedics estimates that 15 to 40 per cent of 2025 paramedic graduates (400 to 1,000 individuals) may be unable to secure a paramedic role on qualification. In the last month alone, over 250 concerned newly qualified paramedics joined a College webinar to share their experiences of struggling to secure employment. The reasons for this looming employment crisis include rapid expansion of pre-registration programmes, recruitment freezes across NHS organisations, reduced post-registration training pathways, and the loss of many roles in primary care following changes to ARRS funding.
Against this backdrop, the Government’s decision to create guaranteed roles for some
professions risks:
• Displacing finite funded posts that other workforces, including paramedics, rely on,
• Worsening competition for limited roles in emergency, urgent care, primary care, and community settings, and
• Sending a damaging signal that the vital contributions of other clinical professions are somehow less valued.
Tracy Nicholls added: “This is not merely a workforce planning concern, but it is also a patient safety and system resilience issue. The NHS cannot function without the full breadth of its professional workforces and undermining one to shore up another is short-sighted and counterproductive in our view.”
As such, we are calling on the Department of Health and Social Care to:
• Pause national roll-out of measures that materially reallocate or convert existing posts until a full cross-profession impact assessment is completed.
• Publish the workforce modelling and assumptions underpinning the Graduate Guarantee, with regional breakdowns and funding sources.
• Convene an urgent roundtable with professional bodies, including the College of Paramedics, HEIs, NHS providers, and regulators to assess impacts across all professions.
• Provide assurance that all posts created are genuinely additional, not achieved by downgrading, freezing, or converting posts used by other professions.
• Commit to transparent monitoring, with publicly reported data on graduate employment rates, post displacement, service gaps, and patient safety impacts.
She added: “While the College of Paramedics is ready and willing to work constructively with Government, we will be unequivocal in defending the recognition, funding, and pipeline integrity of paramedics and other allied health professionals whose contributions are essential to keeping patients safe.”