Doctors who face the dole as MMC's application IT system remains as fiasco
Given all the emphasis on investing in and improving the NHS, the idea of a wave of doctor unemployment seems a nonsense. Alarmingly, however, it is very much a reality. Last week, the fears of thousands of junior doctors were realised when they failed to secure interviews for trainee consultant posts under a new fast-track system called Modernising Medical Careers. The doctors who missed out are left wondering whether to try to retrain in another speciality, emigrate, or leave medicine altogether.
From:
Sarah Hall is the Guardian's health correspondent:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2027287,00.html
I know this because it is the conversation that has been going on in my home. My husband, an orthopaedic registrar, is trying to assess whether he has any hope of becoming a fully trained surgeon, or whether, after committing 12 years - five as a student and seven as a doctor - he should leave medicine altogether.
He hasn't cried - he is too numb for that - but I have never seen him so ashen. A registrar with seven-and-a-half years' experience, a period of research, a regional prize and a list of academic publications, he had been told by his boss - who shortlists - that his application was sufficiently strong. Sure, the glitch-ridden online application form was repetitive, vague and confusing. True, the whole process seemed geared towards the most junior doctors. But he couldn't believe that his commitment and skill would not show through.
Now it is clear that it hasn't - and that this system has scuppered the chances of thousands. No one knows how many of the 30,000 junior doctors are affected - Department of Health officials, who will meet the British Medical Association today, are still collating that information.
But Remedy UK, a grassroots doctors organisation set up two months ago, now has 8,000 members - with 250 applying daily and 3,000 planning to march in protest.
The situation has arisen in part because the government has failed to match the number of training posts - 22,000 - to the 30,000 junior doctors. The most junior, who started on the new system two years ago when they left medical school, have had 5,000 posts ring-fenced for them. But those who began under the old system haven't received such preferential treatment.
Ministers are right to say no one has the right to a trainee post, but the lack of interviews appears to have been compounded by flaws in the selection process. The online application system felt rushed and botched. Results were due on February 24. On the 28th - the day interviews were meant to start - they had still not been completed.
We are used to problematic government IT systems - and the minister initially in charge, Lord Warner, also oversaw the NHS IT system - but it is hard not to fear careers are being ruined because of such flaws.
At a press conference last year, the same minister dismissed the idea of junior doctors' unemployment as "absolute rubbish". Doctors just had to be flexible - change speciality or move. "Instead of working in the south-east," he explained, "they might have to go to Aberdeen." Despite having a wife, daughter and mortgage in London, my husband would jump at that option, were it available. Instead, he is asking if he should retrain, move abroad, or try his luck "in the City", where they apparently value the dedication, coolness and decisiveness of trainee surgeons.
Each option seems bleak. His confidence has been shattered and yet he knows it would be a massive waste, not only of public money - £250,000 just to get him through medical school - but of his talent and experience if he has to hand back his scrubs. "I know what I'm good at," he says, "and I just want to be able to do it."
Health Direct warned last year (6 Mar 06) that the MMC's computerised application was in meltdonw in Junior Doctors' new IT MMC recruitment system is a disaster
It is an irony that many of the questions junior doctors must answer when they fill in the new form to apply for hospital jobs relate to their leadership skills and ability to work as part of a team. The form is part of a new applications procedure, called Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), which involves no human interaction whatsoever.
Hospitals are banned from holding interviews, having to rely instead upon a computer "dating" system that supposedly matches the applicant to the job.
As 80 eminent doctors have been moved to protest to the Department of Health, the results have been disastrous. Sixty junior doctors recruited in this way have failed to demonstrate a basic level of medical competence, while many others have had to be retrained at huge expense.
Some successful east European recruits turned out not to speak English, while 600 well-qualified British students have been left without jobs at all, leaving them unable to complete their training.
No checks have been made, so it seems, on the information that applicants put on the forms. Moreover, in the absence of an interview, there is no way hospitals can be sure whether the applicant is a genuine, qualified medical student or whether they are an impostor who paid someone to fill in their form for them.
And the consequencies of the Dept of Health's incompetence? On June 15, 06 Health Direct posted: NHS faces brain drain, BMA doctors warn
Doctors' leaders said yesterday that the profession faced a potential brain drain because of a shortage of posts being made available under controversial labour government reforms. The British Medical Association said that up to 11,500 doctors could be left disappointed because there were only 9,500 training posts being competed for by more than 21,000 doctors.
But the BMA junior doctors' committee - which will meet officials to lobby for more posts tomorrow - warned the remaining 11,500 would face options including leaving the NHS and working abroad. "There will be a brain drain," said Dr Jo Hilborne, chair of the junior doctors' committee.
"Huge numbers of people will choose to go abroad and significant numbers will choose to leave medicine altogether if they can't get a job in the UK." With each doctor costing £237,000 to get through medical school, such an exodus would constitute a huge waste of money for British taxpayers, she said.
"The alternative - pushing doctors into dead-end jobs so they never get essential skills that would benefit their patients - is unacceptable and won't work. Doctors are simply going to leave the NHS instead," she added.
The warning came a week after the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Bernard Ribeiro, told the Guardian there was "a real danger" the medical reforms could lead to a brain drain similar to that in the 1960s, when doctors went to the US.
The shortfall has arisen because the government increased the number of medical students - from just over 4,000 in 2001 to 7,380 last year - while hospital trusts and deaneries failed to match this with an increase in training posts.
Last week Professor Shelley Heard, the MMC's national clinical adviser, said junior doctors needed to accept that not all would receive training. But critics, including Mr Ribeiro, said doctors who had already committed at least seven years to training were reluctant to settle for jobs which will not lead to consultant status.
A BMA survey shows 61% of doctors would opt to continue their training overseas, and 35% to leave medicine altogether, rather than resign themselves to a career path with no possibility of training. Australian authorities have already visited the UK to recruit doctors.
Dr Hilborne, who will meet MMC officials tomorrow, blamed the government for ignoring doctors' concerns and forging ahead with MMC. "We asked the government to delay this but it's part of their wholesale reform of the NHS, which they're insistent on taking forward" she said. "Meanwhile, these poor guys who by an accident of fate happen to be at this point in their careers are caught in the middle."
Dr Crippen's blog also raises the disgraceful fiasco that is the MMC.
Because this Labour Government and its bureaucrats only see people as a mass, they fail to recognise the power and potential of the individual. Yet it is the individual - significantly so in education and medicine - who can inspire and transform the lives of those with whom they deal.
Throughout history, when the rights of the individual have been denied for the "good of the masses", disaster and misery have quickly followed.
If Labour and the Dept of Health can't run a small database of doctors what hope is there for their white elephant of a database for 60 million patients?
From:
Sarah Hall is the Guardian's health correspondent:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2027287,00.html
I know this because it is the conversation that has been going on in my home. My husband, an orthopaedic registrar, is trying to assess whether he has any hope of becoming a fully trained surgeon, or whether, after committing 12 years - five as a student and seven as a doctor - he should leave medicine altogether.
He hasn't cried - he is too numb for that - but I have never seen him so ashen. A registrar with seven-and-a-half years' experience, a period of research, a regional prize and a list of academic publications, he had been told by his boss - who shortlists - that his application was sufficiently strong. Sure, the glitch-ridden online application form was repetitive, vague and confusing. True, the whole process seemed geared towards the most junior doctors. But he couldn't believe that his commitment and skill would not show through.
Now it is clear that it hasn't - and that this system has scuppered the chances of thousands. No one knows how many of the 30,000 junior doctors are affected - Department of Health officials, who will meet the British Medical Association today, are still collating that information.
But Remedy UK, a grassroots doctors organisation set up two months ago, now has 8,000 members - with 250 applying daily and 3,000 planning to march in protest.
The situation has arisen in part because the government has failed to match the number of training posts - 22,000 - to the 30,000 junior doctors. The most junior, who started on the new system two years ago when they left medical school, have had 5,000 posts ring-fenced for them. But those who began under the old system haven't received such preferential treatment.
Ministers are right to say no one has the right to a trainee post, but the lack of interviews appears to have been compounded by flaws in the selection process. The online application system felt rushed and botched. Results were due on February 24. On the 28th - the day interviews were meant to start - they had still not been completed.
We are used to problematic government IT systems - and the minister initially in charge, Lord Warner, also oversaw the NHS IT system - but it is hard not to fear careers are being ruined because of such flaws.
At a press conference last year, the same minister dismissed the idea of junior doctors' unemployment as "absolute rubbish". Doctors just had to be flexible - change speciality or move. "Instead of working in the south-east," he explained, "they might have to go to Aberdeen." Despite having a wife, daughter and mortgage in London, my husband would jump at that option, were it available. Instead, he is asking if he should retrain, move abroad, or try his luck "in the City", where they apparently value the dedication, coolness and decisiveness of trainee surgeons.
Each option seems bleak. His confidence has been shattered and yet he knows it would be a massive waste, not only of public money - £250,000 just to get him through medical school - but of his talent and experience if he has to hand back his scrubs. "I know what I'm good at," he says, "and I just want to be able to do it."
Health Direct warned last year (6 Mar 06) that the MMC's computerised application was in meltdonw in Junior Doctors' new IT MMC recruitment system is a disaster
It is an irony that many of the questions junior doctors must answer when they fill in the new form to apply for hospital jobs relate to their leadership skills and ability to work as part of a team. The form is part of a new applications procedure, called Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), which involves no human interaction whatsoever.
Hospitals are banned from holding interviews, having to rely instead upon a computer "dating" system that supposedly matches the applicant to the job.
As 80 eminent doctors have been moved to protest to the Department of Health, the results have been disastrous. Sixty junior doctors recruited in this way have failed to demonstrate a basic level of medical competence, while many others have had to be retrained at huge expense.
Some successful east European recruits turned out not to speak English, while 600 well-qualified British students have been left without jobs at all, leaving them unable to complete their training.
No checks have been made, so it seems, on the information that applicants put on the forms. Moreover, in the absence of an interview, there is no way hospitals can be sure whether the applicant is a genuine, qualified medical student or whether they are an impostor who paid someone to fill in their form for them.
And the consequencies of the Dept of Health's incompetence? On June 15, 06 Health Direct posted: NHS faces brain drain, BMA doctors warn
Doctors' leaders said yesterday that the profession faced a potential brain drain because of a shortage of posts being made available under controversial labour government reforms. The British Medical Association said that up to 11,500 doctors could be left disappointed because there were only 9,500 training posts being competed for by more than 21,000 doctors.
But the BMA junior doctors' committee - which will meet officials to lobby for more posts tomorrow - warned the remaining 11,500 would face options including leaving the NHS and working abroad. "There will be a brain drain," said Dr Jo Hilborne, chair of the junior doctors' committee.
"Huge numbers of people will choose to go abroad and significant numbers will choose to leave medicine altogether if they can't get a job in the UK." With each doctor costing £237,000 to get through medical school, such an exodus would constitute a huge waste of money for British taxpayers, she said.
"The alternative - pushing doctors into dead-end jobs so they never get essential skills that would benefit their patients - is unacceptable and won't work. Doctors are simply going to leave the NHS instead," she added.
The warning came a week after the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Bernard Ribeiro, told the Guardian there was "a real danger" the medical reforms could lead to a brain drain similar to that in the 1960s, when doctors went to the US.
The shortfall has arisen because the government increased the number of medical students - from just over 4,000 in 2001 to 7,380 last year - while hospital trusts and deaneries failed to match this with an increase in training posts.
Last week Professor Shelley Heard, the MMC's national clinical adviser, said junior doctors needed to accept that not all would receive training. But critics, including Mr Ribeiro, said doctors who had already committed at least seven years to training were reluctant to settle for jobs which will not lead to consultant status.
A BMA survey shows 61% of doctors would opt to continue their training overseas, and 35% to leave medicine altogether, rather than resign themselves to a career path with no possibility of training. Australian authorities have already visited the UK to recruit doctors.
Dr Hilborne, who will meet MMC officials tomorrow, blamed the government for ignoring doctors' concerns and forging ahead with MMC. "We asked the government to delay this but it's part of their wholesale reform of the NHS, which they're insistent on taking forward" she said. "Meanwhile, these poor guys who by an accident of fate happen to be at this point in their careers are caught in the middle."
Dr Crippen's blog also raises the disgraceful fiasco that is the MMC.
Because this Labour Government and its bureaucrats only see people as a mass, they fail to recognise the power and potential of the individual. Yet it is the individual - significantly so in education and medicine - who can inspire and transform the lives of those with whom they deal.
Throughout history, when the rights of the individual have been denied for the "good of the masses", disaster and misery have quickly followed.
If Labour and the Dept of Health can't run a small database of doctors what hope is there for their white elephant of a database for 60 million patients?
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8:42 AM
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