Currently submitted to: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Mar 18, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 27, 2026 - May 22, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Visualizing Specialty Training Competition Ratios: Creating and Evaluating an Interactive Dashboard to Improve Medical Career Planning
ABSTRACT
Background:
Competition for specialty training in the United Kingdom has increased significantly in recent years. Current competition ratio data exists on separate webpages on the NHS England website, which makes comparing ratios across time and specialty difficult. This lack of accessible information can hinder career planning and, in turn, increases uncertainty around competition ratios - a topic at the forefront of current discussion among trainees.
Objective:
This project aimed to evaluate the user experience of a dashboard-based visualization tool illustrating the consolidated NHS data.
Methods:
Data from the NHS England website for the period 2013-2025 were collected. An interactive dashboard was then developed and published online at specialtytrainingcompetition.com. Usefulness of the dashboard was evaluated through usage data analytics and by inviting users to answer the question "how useful did you find this dashboard?" using a Likert-scale rating from 1 (not useful) to 5 (extremely useful) and a free-text box for "suggestions or feedback".
Results:
5,700 unique users have visited the website at the time of writing. 401 valid usefulness ratings were collected. The mean usefulness score was 4.37 (SD=0.90), with a median of 5 (IQR 4-5), indicating the dashboard was a useful way to visualize competition ratio data - a finding supported by the free-text feedback.
Conclusions:
This study demonstrates the value of an open-access interactive dashboard to visualize UK specialty training competition ratios at a time when focus on competition has intensified. By consolidating recruitment data into an interactive format, the dashboard provides a practical means of exploring publicly available workforce data.
Citation
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