Interview chaos forces a U-turn over doctors (DM)
From Mmc
Interview chaos forces a U-turn over doctors
By DANIEL MARTIN Last updated at 22:00pm on 9th March 2007
Ministers have backed down on their hugely controversial recruitment process for junior doctors.
In a humiliating U-turn, the Department of Health agreed to rerun the first round of its new system after a flood of complaints.
Doctors had claimed that many highly-qualified candidates had not been given an interview because of the new computerised application system.
The embarrassing climbdown comes after consultants from across the country started refusing to carry out interviews, saying they had no confidence that the right candidates were being selected.
But there will still be 30,000 applicants vying for only 22,000 posts. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has met the presidents of the major medical royal colleges and has agreed to run the first round of the Modernising Medical Careers interview process again.
The computerised selection process which was being used has been scrapped.
Consultants will now use full CVs and the customary structured interview to select candidates for jobs.
All candidates who have been previously selected for interview will still be interviewed. But trained medical advisors will now go back and examine in detail the candidates who were left out first time round.
Those candidates potentially worthy of training posts will now re-enter the process and go forward to interview at no disadvantage.
The Royal College of Surgeons hailed the climbdown, saying Modernising Medical Careers had "clearly failed and caused deep distress to both trainees and those who were tasked with selection".
President Bernard Ribeiro said: "Over the last few weeks I have gathered evidence from surgeons, trainees and their families around the country and I understand the distress that the MTAS process has caused.
"It is clear that there is a large group of highly-skilled trainees who have not been shortlisted for interview due to faults in the application process.
"I am pleased to say that the Secretary of State for Health has listened to our advice and acted quickly to set up this review which has hopefully reassured both patients and trainees.
"We can only be part of an application process that provides the NHS with firstclass trainee surgeons - this is vital for the safety of patients. The college has consistently given advice to the MMC team on a process for selection of surgeons by surgeons.
"I will continue to pressurise the department to act on our advice to introduce a selection process for next year which is fair to all and effectively selects the highest quality surgical trainees for our NHS, our patients deserve no less."
A spokesman for the British Medical Association said: "This is an acceptable way forward. There is more work to do on round two. There will inevitably be in the whole process.
'After this year's selection process has been completed we want an independent inquiry into the whole process."
