Appalling treatment of junior doctors (letters)
From Mmc
Appalling treatment of junior doctors
Sir: As a teenager my husband made the decision to become a doctor, out of a vocation to use his obvious academic talent to help others. He has studied hard for five years (building up considerable debt in the process) and has worked for five years after that. Despite recent improvements, the hours of a junior doctor are some of the longest and most anti-social of any profession. He has also spent considerable time studying for further qualifications, attending additional clinics outside his contracted hours, carrying out audits, attending training courses etc in the belief that these would help him to progress in his chosen field. All of this adds up to almost slavish devotion to his career, meaning that outside interests, family and social life have been sadly neglected; he was happy to do this however out of dedication to the NHS and his chosen career.
Then along came Modernising Medical Careers and Medical Training Application Service (The Sketch, 20 March), and we now find that after thousands of hours of work and study my husband, along with over 30,000 others, will be allowed to attend only one half-hour interview for one job. He will either get that job or face the scrapheap. We will have to take a huge gamble with selecting which job he asks to be considered for - choosing the job he actually wants is too big a risk as there are only two positions available. Suddenly gone is the basic freedom enjoyed by workers in every other profession - to apply, and be considered for, any job for which one is adequately qualified.
This is an appalling way to treat some of the most talented and most dedicated young people working in the UK today. Each of those junior doctors represents over £250,000 of public money spent on training but these reforms will lead to many of them being unemployed.
This poor workforce planning within the NHS comes at great financial cost to the tax payer, and great personal cost to those who have dedicated their lives to caring for others, only to find after several years that they are surplus to requirements.
This system must be abandoned immediately and the architects of it must be held accountable.
HELEN FLIGHT
MANCHESTER
