Junior doctors: new system leaves careers in chaos
From Mmc
Junior doctors: new system leaves careers in chaos
It should have been a joyful time. Duncan and Bryony Taylor are expecting their second child in August and have reached the stage in life usually known as "settling down".
Instead, they are having to rent out their Edinburgh flat and move in with Mr Taylor's parents in Perthshire. His wife's only future career option is in Aberdeen, and he is facing life on the dole queue just as Mrs Taylor prepares to give birth.
Their mistake? To become junior doctors, devoting a total of nearly 15 years of their lives to medicine, helped by up to £250,000 each from the taxpayer.
The Taylors are the human face of a profession in turmoil because of a new training system. But they are not alone. The lives of thousands of junior doctors across the UK have been thrown into chaos.
By late yesterday, around 1000 junior doctors who ticked Scotland as their favoured option did not have a job offer here, only five weeks before the work begins.
While most will still find places, the fear is that many others, like Mr Taylor, will become unemployed after a massively complex recruiting system in which places are being offered, accepted or rejected, and reoffered on a daily basis.
Many are opting out of the chaos and taking their talents abroad, with Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland all benefitting. It is feared there could be a lost generation of British doctors.
A protest march about the situation is likely to take place next month and a petition has been launched.
Some established consultants share young doctors' deep concerns. Professor Charles Warlow, professor of medical neurology at the Western General in Edinburgh, said: "This is the most gigantic shambles since I have been working in the NHS, since 1968. I cannot believe the chaos and the lack of information."
The old regime where young doctors worked through a series of training grades to become specialist consultants, shuts down on August 1. Some 2100 doctors will be leaving their current posts in Scotland, and successful applicants will start in the new on-the-job training programmes. Concerns are being expressed about how patient services will cope with so many fresh staff, some whom have relocated from elsewhere with little notice.
The anger of those excluded has been fuelled by the disastrous online applications process MTAS, which was blighted by technical problems as well as allegations that it did not take sufficient account of candidates' achievements and failed to shortlist well regarded doctors.
Many of those caught in the change-over are like the Taylors - people who had begun advancing along the old career route and have already built family lives.
Mr Taylor, 32, said: "We have both devoted a number of years to the medical profession and worked hard to get to this position. Then to be told, all of a sudden, our progression has been blocked, is very difficult. We are both feeling quite bitter and let down."
He graduated from Edinburgh University in 1999, has been training in psychiatry for four years, and was seeking to join the new training programme halfway through. His wife, a 33-year-old Cambridge graduate, was looking to enter general practice training.
Last autumn, when the British Medical Association was demanding a delay to the shake-up, the couple took the reassurances offered by health officials in good faith. They were told their applications could be linked, helping to keep them, their 18-month-old daughter Rhianna, and newborn child together. "We both assumed that we would have quite a high chance of getting a job and being linked to the same area," said Mr Taylor.
The new system allows juniors to apply for a total of four training programmes, which are divided into speciality areas and broad geographical regions, with Scotland counting as one patch.
Mr Taylor was shortlisted for psychiatry interviews in three places but has not been offered a single post. His wife secured one interview. She was successful but, when asked which part of Scotland she would prefer to work in, she was given her last choice - the north.
The couple had hoped to move to within commuting distance of Mr Taylor's parents to help with childcare. Instead, they are preparing to move to Aberdeen, with Mr Taylor facing the prospect of unemployment.
The first round of job offers finishes in England only today and, as the dust settles, he may get a position somewhere else, but this could leave him hundreds of miles from his wife and children. An employment contract outside the training system is another possibility, perhaps as a locum, but he does not know what chance he has of re-entering the system afterwards.
The couple describe themselves as shocked. "I think the problem is we do not have the information we need to make a decision," said Mr Taylor.
"I think that's really what creates a lot of the anxiety; certainly that's true for other people we have spoken to," he said.
"With only a few weeks left to August, there's still no information about what is going to happen to people who have not got one of these run-through training positions."
Moving to Australia to progress their careers is now one of the possibilities they are weighing up. "It would be a terrible thing, especially with a new baby on the way, but unfortunately we have to look at all the options," said Mr Taylor.
A senior consultant told The Herald Mr Taylor was "more than half way" to becoming a psychiatrist and "had not put a foot wrong".
However, the junior doctor fears the nature of the new application form and the interview process which followed did not allow him to reflect the level of experience he had in the way that an ordinary CV would have done.
He may find little solace in the words of Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon. She said: "Dr Harry Burns (chief medical officer) has always been clear this was never a get-in-this-year-or-not-at-all.' It will take more than one year to absorb all of the doctors in the new system."
12:05am today
Exclusive By HELEN PUTTICK, Health Correspondent
