Association of Surgeons in Training

From Mmc

5 March 2007

LETTER FROM Association of Surgeons in Training to the Media

"Further to our telephone conversation last week you may be interested to know that a selection (interview) panel in the West Midlands deanery has just stood down and refused to carry out interviews today to appoint surgical trainees over major concerns that no long-listing of applications was performed, and that inappropriate people have been shortlisted don the basis of experience and immigration status. The panel had no-confidence in the process and have therefore refused to go through with the interviews.

As you may be aware, the West Midlands is one of the largest deaneries in the country and I strongly suspect that the decision here will have a knock-on effect and similar things replicated throughout the country.

This may well spell disaster for the MTAS system and hence cause major problems and the system to fail. This would represent a huge disaster for the public given the amount of public funds invested in the MMC and MTAS programmes, which would be rendered effectively useless at this stage. This is now a story that should be drawn to the public's attention.

I have attached a copy of a letter of invite that we had sent to the Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt last week to which a response is awaited. This is an initial approach and a more strongly worded letter will follow this week as it is now time that the Secretary of State for Health stood up publicly and stated the position of the DoH. I had alluded last week to a background document which I have also attached, but I hope you will forgive me that it is not in ideal format just at the minute but I think that given developments that this will help you get to grips with the interlinked problems facing medical training.

With regards to this process:

We communicated with members of the interview panel in the West Midlands last night to express our concern over the proposed action being considered and we felt that the interview process should continue and that if the candidates were not of the highest possible calibre that they should not be appointed. We expressed concern that some very good candidates may well have been shortlisted and appointable, and that a failure to carry out the interviews would be of detriment to these people.

Whilst we are disappointed with this outcome, we fully sympathise and understand the position of the panel in the West Midlands, and wish to support their decision fully given the fact that no long-listing had occurred. We now feel it extremely important that we now work together to find a method of selecting the best candidates for surgical training in order that we can protect the high quality of surgeons that the training process will deliver as consultants to deliver patient care in the future.

This may involve a complete abandonment of the MTAS selection process for surgery and for individual deaneries to advertise, shortlist, and recruit individuals this year using the same manner as previous years. Whilst the MTAS system has tried to move to a more robust system of selection of surgeons for the future, this has proven not to have worked due to the intense timeframes involved and the inherent complexities of the processes that were tried to be implemented. It is frustrating that a huge amount of public funds and time of individuals has been wasted through the pressure to introduce a system that is not fit for purpose within a timeframe that was pointed out, by us, in November 2005 to be too short.

Whilst we are disappointed that this process has fallen down, we feel very strongly that we now need to move forward with a process that will be fit for purpose and allow us to be able to appoint people to the grades applicable for entry to the MMC process. We support the introduction of MMC, but our concerns remain over the feasibility, reliability, and validity of the MTAS system to accurately distinguish those doctors who are suitable to progress in training. We feel at this stage that abandonment of the MTAS system and the selection of individuals by the appropriate methods used previously is now imperative to allow the process to move forward urgently within the timeframe allowed."

Regards,

Conor

Conor Marron President Association of Surgeons in Training at The Royal College of Surgeons of England 35/43 Lincoln's Inn Fields London WC2A 3PN