Fears for Doctors
From Mmc
Fears for doctors
Last Modified: 17 Jul 2007 By: Victoria Macdonald
Hospitals have been formally told to be on suicide alert over fears junior doctors could be pushed to the edge by recruiting system problems.
Around 34,000 people applied for jobs using MTAS, the now discredited on-line application system for junior doctors seeking specialist training post.
It has now closed after Channel 4 News revealed a massive security breach - the names, addresses even sexual orientations of medical students exposed.
Now the man held largely responsible for the problems, England's chief medical officer, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, has spoken for the first time about the controversy.
He said: "My principle aim in putting together this policy was to make the senior house officer years, the early years of training, more humane, more based on education and giving doctors a much better career structure."
But the modernisation programme has descended into chaos.
"We deeply empathise with the uncertainty and anxiety that was created." Sir Liam Donaldson
The Government was forced to reopen the interviews because of claims the first round was simply unfair. Sir Liam added: "It was a very very complex programme to implement and the transition from an old, out of date system of training to a new one was a very big transition and things did go wrong in the detail of the implementation and that caused a lot of distress and anxiety to junior doctors which I and everybody else involved very very much regret.
"We deeply empathise with the uncertainty and anxiety that was created."
But it is the new career structure that has caused so many problems for doctors.
This year almost all vacancies at every specialist training level will be filled.
If you miss a place this time, you may have to go back to the beginning, move to Australia, or give up medicine altogether. Junior doctor Keith Davies said: "I have only done a couple of years but I have already gone down the route towards A&E, Ive done specific exams for A&E, Ive done a year in A&E and specific jobs that would help me in that and now Ive got to go back to the bottom because all those jobs have gone.
Some juniors are still not being allowed, despite promises, to submit CVs, so they cannot say how many research papers they have had published or even what type of degrees they have got.
We have also learned that in some cases the deadlines for applying to posts in the second round expired before the first was over.
This meant candidates were not told and they did not know to look for the jobs until it was too late. Even at this late stage of the crisis, no-one at the Department of Health seems to know, or be willing to say, precisely how many juniors are facing unemployment.
"Among doctors who have not been offered a post 32 per cent of them had a first class degree or a distinction whereas among doctors who have been offered a post only 26 per cent of them have a first class degree or a distinction." Professor Morris Brown
"But I have only done two years, these people have done ten years. They are in the same position.
"They quite rightly don't want to go back to the bottom because they are older than me, they've got kids they don't want to go back to doing nights all the time, being at the bottom of the rung, so they are leaving the country." Over the past few months hundreds of juniors have sent us their stories, doctors with sometimes ten years' experience on the wards, publications to their names, distinictions, impressive degrees. All without jobs. Now Professor Morris Brown, of Cambridge University , appears to have proved what many suspected.
In a poll of 1,300 juniors, he found the better they were qualified, the less likely they were to have been offered a training job.
Professor Brown said: "For our main measure of excellence we used either first class degree or a distinction and what we found was that among doctors who have not been offered a post 32 per cent of them had a first class degree or a distinction whereas among doctors who have been offered a post only 26 per cent of them have a first class degree or a distinction. "That leads us to conclude that the process had led to a selective cull of the best." Sir Liam Donaldson described that as a sweeping generalisation.
He said: "We don't have any evidence that there has been any discrimination of that sort.
"The evidence that we have so far coming back from the postgraduate deans is that a lot of very very high quality appointments have been made. Round one in the junior doctors job application process is now finished.
Round two has begun and will go through until October 31.
But already problems are emerging.
