We need a national outcry
From Mmc
We need a national outcry
Angela Phillips June 11, 2007 2:30 PM
Jacquie, mother of a two year old, loses her job. Her home and her future are on the line so she goes down to the job centre. After weeks of waiting, she is offered a position by email. It doesn't say what it is, only that it is: "Somewhere in the London area" and that it has minimal career prospects. She has 48 hours to decide whether to take it. No more information is forthcoming and if she refuses there may not be another offer. What should she do? She could be faced with a four hour commute across London and back. It starts almost immediately. There is no time to look for a place to live (she wouldn't know where to look anyway). No time to arrange childcare. No way of knowing how it would fit with her partner's working hours.
If job centres did behave like this there would be a national outcry. Letters would be written in the press about a return to the poor law. Campaigning newspapers would be calling for heads to roll. Equality campaigners would be berating the officials who have so little concern for the lives of parents that they could suggest such an upheaval let alone offer it in a form of Russian Roulette. There would be references to the worst excess of the 1980s when Norman Tebbitt was excoriated for his demand that the unemployed should; "Get on their bikes". Indeed there is only one organisation in a democratic country that has the right to manage people's lives in this high-handed way. That is the army and even in the army you expect to be housed and are given the chance to agree to the arrangement before signing up for initial training.
So why the deafening silence when this is what is happening to junior doctors right now as this year's job offers are sent out? When they signed up, as medical students, they didn't sign away their rights to be treated a professionals with individual needs. They did so in the belief that this was a profession that would (after many long and gruelling years of training) offer stability, respect, job satisfaction - and yes - financial security. The fact that they are paid reasonably well (though not compared with city bankers, corporate lawyers, business consultants, media moguls and footballers) is not an excuse for treating them like cogs in a state machine. This is Stalinism, so why is a government that believes in choice as the motor of all human endeavour, getting away with it?
So stop for a moment and contemplate the real life of just one of the young professionals caught up in this mess. The Jacquie of this story was not applying for a job at the higher echelons of a city bank where she would make money from the sweat of other people's brows. She was applying for a training job in what has been described the Cinderella service. Her ambition was to be an NHS psychiatrist working to help those people who fall to the very bottom of the urban pile. It is hard to imagine a branch of medicine that more sorely needs highly motivated and focussed young brains. After training for 10 years she had already secured (she believed) a training job in a teaching hospital near where she lives with a view to moving into research. Then the entire recruitment system was pulled up by the roots. The new process did not allow her to mention that she already has a Phd, in a related field, paid for on a grant from the Wellcome Trust. The entire process hung on a brief interview in which she was scored, with tick boxes, according to her response to twelve brief questions. When this flawed process was initially revealed there was enough concern to get the system stopped in its tracks - but only for the second round. But those already interviewed didn't get a second chance. After weeks of waiting she has been offered a temporary training post that may lead nowhere and could be many miles away from her home. When I described this process to the director of personnel at a London college she was literally speechless.
Junior doctors have already done between 5 and 7 years of training. They didn't sign up for the job because they had no other option (like so many army recruits). They worked their way through an exceptionally competitive system in which most fail at the first hurdle. Their job involves working unsocial hours. They deal with people at the extremes of joy and pain. We often berate them for not being as good as they should be. But we do so because our expectations are so high. In what other job would you be exposed to a similar level of grief, anger and guilt for making what could be a fairly small mistake on an off day? We choose our doctors from the same small pool of the brightest young people as do the banks, law firms and the media. Those who chose medicine could chose a far faster route to financial security. Is that what we want? Do we want medicine to become a profession that attracts only those who can't find a more congenial way to make money? After all, this government believes in choice. If it treats its doctors like this, why would it expect future choice-driven young people to choose this profession? This generation of doctors will have their lives wrecked. The next generation of would be doctors may not be there at all.
