The new system has forced us to work hundreds of miles apart
From Mmc
The new system has forced us to work hundreds of miles apart
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 13/07/2007
On August 1, junior doctors across the country will take up the new posts they applied for through the controversial Medical Training Application System (MTAS), which has left up to 12,000 without jobs. Continuing our series investigating the impact of the MTAS debacle, two junior doctors describe their experiences. Bryony Gordon reports
On August 1, junior doctors across the country will take up the new posts they applied for through the controversial Medical Training Application System (MTAS), which has left up to 12,000 without jobs. Continuing our series investigating the impact of the MTAS debacle, two junior doctors describe their experiences.
Max Hodges "The new system has forced us to work hundreds of miles apart" Max Hodges with his fiancé Emma Lane: 'I believe that this new system is not about creating very good doctors - it's about creating desperate doctors who will do anything for a job'
Max Hodges, 29, graduated from Bristol University in 2000 and is specialising in anaesthetics. He lives with his fiancée, Emma Lane, 27, also a junior doctor, in Exeter.
I had planned to take Emma up on to Dartmoor to propose, but being constantly busy, and forever exhausted, we never made it there.
So at the end of a week of nights at the hospital where we both work in Exeter, I ended up dropping on to one knee in our sitting room.
She said yes immediately. That was almost a year ago. Right now we should be planning our wedding on September 1 - and we are, sort of. But the planning is tinged with a very real sadness.
Thanks to the MTAS fiasco, Emma and I will be starting our married lives several hundred miles apart, and very possibly continuing that way for at least a year.
Emma and I met four years ago at a hospital in Torbay. We have travelled the world together and worked for a year as doctors in Australia. In a country on the other side of the world we managed to stick together, but in our own that has proved impossible.
If I want to continue towards my goal of becoming a consultant anaesthetist, I must got to the West Midlands. If Emma wants to become a GP, she must stay here in Exeter.
Emma and I both wanted to work in the "Peninsula" Deanery in the South-West. It is where we own a house and where many of our family and friends are.
While Emma managed to get a post in the area, I was deemed unemployable by the Deanery, according to MTAS.
I do not claim to be an exceptional candidate but as well as specialising in anaesthetics I have specialised in intensive care and accident and emergency medicine. And I resent this new system telling me that a Trust that has employed me for several years now finds me unemployable.
The West Midlands could somehow make do with my skills, and I was offered a training post there. It was obviously a relief to discover after seven years of arduous training that my career wasn't over. Many of my highly trained colleagues find themselves in that position with no training post and no way of advancing their career.
It has not been the easiest of rides, though. I only found out at the beginning of June, weeks after many of my friends had learned their fate. That was nerve-wracking.
Now, with just three weeks to go before I start my new post, I have still not been told which hospital I will be working at. The most I know is that it could be in Coventry, Birmingham or Stoke.
I can't look for somewhere to live without knowing where I'll be working, and nobody at MTAS seems to care that I am now going to have to pay the mortgage on our house in Exeter plus rent for one in the West Midlands.
Nor can I call anyone to ask for leave for my wedding and honeymoon, or for my stag do in two weekends' time. I still don't know my salary or have a breakdown of my job.
I can't think of any other profession where it would be deemed acceptable to make candidates apply for jobs that they know so little about.
Emma and I do have options… or at least one option. After a year she will be entitled to an inter-deanery transfer. If she can't get it, she will quit medicine altogether, because we want to start a family and you can't do that living apart from each other.
It makes me very angry that she has been made to feel this desperate after the commitment she has shown to the NHS. She is a very good doctor.
But I believe that this new system is not about creating very good doctors - it's about creating desperate doctors who will do anything for a job.
I am philosophical about MTAS - I believe you have to play the hand that you are dealt. But I do feel very sad. Emma and I have had non-stop exams for the last 18 months. Now is the time we were looking forward to spending together. Instead we must spend it apart.
