Blog: Medical Council Training Survey – Your Training, Your Voice

The Medical Council redeveloped its survey for interns and trainees in 2026. Formerly known as Your Training Counts, which ran from 2014-2021, the updated survey opened in April 2026 and ran until 3 June 2026. It gives interns and trainees the opportunity every year to voice their experiences on clinical training sites to the Medical Council.

The Medical Council Training Survey for 2026 has now closed. Results and findings will follow in due course.

The launch of the Medical Council’s redesigned survey for medical interns and trainees on formal training schemes will enable these doctors to directly share their experiences of clinical training sites across Ireland. The Medical Council Training Survey will offer valuable insight into how effectively training environments support education and training, professional development, and overall wellbeing. Viewed through a patient‑safety lens, the survey will ensure that the voices of interns and trainees help inform and drive improvements in the settings where patient care is delivered.

Patient safety is central to the Medical Council’s standards, criteria, and guidelines for medical education and training, and this is reflected throughout the survey design. Accordingly, patient safety is one of the survey’s four quality indicators, alongside education and training opportunities, organisational culture, and health and wellbeing.

The survey explores a broad range of factors that influence patient safety and quality of care, including preparedness for practice; barriers to delivering safe and effective care; staffing levels and working hours; incident and concern‑reporting systems; reflection and learning from adverse events, critical incidents, and near misses. It also examines feedback processes, handover practices to support continuity of care, induction arrangements, and the quality of clinical and educational supervision.

The Medical Council has long highlighted the importance of good professional practice and its impact on patient safety through the Eight Domains of Good Professional Practice and the Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners.

Doctors renewing their registration each year complete an Annual Retention Form. In 2024, the form asked doctors for the first time about patient safety. Findings published in the Medical Council’s Workforce Intelligence Report 2024 showed that just over a quarter of doctors (26.1%) experienced difficulty providing sufficient patient care at least once a week or more. These insights help identify factors that may undermine safe patient care, good practice, and effective teamwork across different groups of doctors.

Strong participation in the survey is essential to ensure the results accurately reflect clinical training sites, regional health areas, specialty rotations, intern networks, and postgraduate training bodies. A robust national picture will enable the Medical Council to work with stakeholders to share effective practice and drive meaningful improvements in training environments, ultimately supporting better patient outcomes.

All interns and trainees on the Medical Council register will receive an email invitation with a link to the survey, and everyone is encouraged to take part, so their voice is heard.

Currently, there are 882 interns and 4,336 trainees registered with the Medical Council in Ireland. A high response rate is vital to understand what is happening on the ground in clinical learning environments from the perspective of doctors in training. All responses are anonymous, and any reporting by the Medical Council will present only high‑level findings, with no individual responses identified.