Hewitt backs down in junior doctors row
From Mmc
Hewitt backs down in junior doctors row
John Carvel, social affairs editor Wednesday May 16, 2007
The health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, was yesterday forced to abandon a controversial online system for junior doctors to apply for training as consultants. In an embarrassing climbdown on the eve of a legal challenge in the high court, she told MPs that the medical training application system (MTAS) would not be used for the rest of this year's interviewing process. Offers of training places will be made within the next six weeks to about 16,000 junior doctors who were selected for interview using the online system, which gave more weight to a crude personality test than to evidence of candidates' medical ability. But Ms Hewitt said a second round of interviews, offering a further 7,000 places, would be conducted by the medical deaneries on traditional lines, using doctors' CVs as the basis for assessing their competence.
"Given the continuing concerns of junior doctors about MTAS, the system will not be used for matching candidates to training posts," she said in a written Commons statement. Her retreat came as Remedy UK, a junior doctor protest group, prepared for a judicial review in the courts today, calling for the entire selection process to start afresh to avoid unfairness to doctors whose careers were blighted by being denied interviews they deserved to get. The system created a storm of protest in March when it emerged that hundreds of the ablest junior doctors were not selected for any interviews. Ms Hewitt adjusted the process to give everyone another chance, but the system was further discredited by a security leak that may have allowed intimate personal information to become accessible on the MTAS website. Ms Hewitt said there may have been criminal offences; a report on the leak had been passed to the police. The alleged breaches are understood to relate to how personal information about junior doctors came to be seen by reporters. Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said Ms Hewitt's statement was "a massive and embarrassing admission of failure. Having stubbornly persisted with the current system despite calls for its abandonment, she is now dropping it one day before court proceedings begin into its fairness." Andrew Rowland, vice-chairman of the BMA's junior doctors committee, said: "The Department of Health has at last seen sense and effectively abandoned the unfair, discredited and shambolic MTAS system. Junior doctors ... have had to go through months of anxiety about their NHS careers." Dr Rowland said it would be disastrous for doctors, patients and the NHS if the tens of thousands of interviews that had already taken place were written off. This would be the outcome if Remedy UK were to succeed in its legal challenge. Dinesh Bhugra, college dean at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: "We need to take lessons from this fiasco on board, and ensure that any system which replaces MTAS does so effectively, sensitively and appropriately, and is piloted extensively." A Department of Health spokesman said the MTAS system was not being scrapped entirely. It would continue to be used to monitor appointments this year and may be reintroduced next year, subject to an review of the selection process.
