Harvey Marcovitch, a leading consultant paediatrician and spokesman for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said the Department of Health had been very receptive to requests for more training posts, partly because it was closely monitoring the number of places needed.
But he said he was wary that the recruitment drive would be insufficient because a potential "future major problem" could be created by career breaks taken by the growing number of women entering the profession - seven out of ten new entrants are women.
"Evidence shows that, in general, women are taking career breaks," he said. "We're beginning to find we need a lot of extra people just to cover that."
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