Background The Cambridge Bachelor of Medicine (MB)/Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) programme was established in 1989 as Europe’s first integrated clinical -doctoral research training programme. Here we evaluate long-term outcomes of the programme 36 years after its introduction.

Methods To track mature career choices, research productivity, group leader and senior authorship status, we analysed the career outcomes of graduates enrolling on the programme between 1989 and 2014. This was accomplished by scrutinising institutional pages, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and PubMed profiles of MB/PhD programme alumni.

Results We obtained data for 166 of 183 programme alumni (91%) who enrolled between 1989 and 2014, with a median follow up of 16 years. Among graduates, 139 (84%) remain in clinical practice and 27 (16%) transitioned to non-clinical careers. Clinical graduates entered medical (81%) and surgical (19%) specialties, with neurology and medical oncology most frequently chosen among the medical specialties. Neurosurgery and ophthalmology were the most favoured surgical specialties chosen. Research engagement remains high: 135 graduates (81%) have published research within the last five years and 28 (17%) hold group leadership positions. Of the the graduates no longer in clinical practice, most have taken up positions in industry (59%) and almost one fifth remain in academia.

Conclusions The Cambridge MB/PhD programme has produced versatile graduates who contribute to the advancement of medicine within its complex professional ecosystem. Active research engagement (81%) and securement of group leadership positions among alumni (17%), attest to the ability of our graduates to sustain academic career choices within the context of contemporary clinical practice. That most graduates also continue to conduct research shows that the original goals of the programme have been met.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

This study did not receive any funding.

I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.

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The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

Records of programme members were accessed minimally by the authors to ensure that data and figures presented are confidential and non-identifiable. An anonymised spreadsheet was used for figure generation further to protect anonymity. Institutional permission to conduct this work and the release of these data to those directly working on the project (AMP, HD, SJM, and TMC) was granted on 25 September 2024 by the Head of the Educational Division of the University of Cambridge's School of Clinical Medicine. Notably, the data provided to the authors consisted solely of name, year of intake, PhD start date, year of PhD award, and PhD duration. No other personal data were provided or accessed. As stated in Methods, only sources in the public domain were used to obtain outcome data for analysis.

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All data produced in the present study are confidential.