Housing blow for junior doctors in new recruitment fiasco

Junior doctors beginning their training in hospitals will no longer have their accommodation found or paid for, it emerged today.

The Conservatives accused ministers of "robbing junior doctors of a roof over their heads" just months after mishandling their recruitment to speciality training places under the Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) system.

Just under 4,000 UK trained junior doctors have so far not got a training post.

Under the system in place before the introduction of MMC this year, employers were required to offer Pre-Registration House Officers accommodation on site for their first year's training.

But changes introduced without parliamentary debate mean that the trainees are no longer automatically entitled to rooms.

The change came into force in August, but hospitals were asked to delay it until 2008, as jobs had already been advertised with accommodation.

The Conservatives said that the Department of Health had "added insult to injury" by making free or subsidised accommodation offered to junior doctors after August 2008 taxable as a benefit in kind.

Stephen O'Brien, the Tory health spokesman, said the change would cause problems for many junior doctors, who have to move between hospitals as many as four times in their first year, making it difficult to secure private rented accommodation.

From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/15/ndoctors115.xml

On Sept 13, 2007 Health Direct posted A terrible way to treat our doctors- Financial Times Comment

Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) is a suitably Orwellian name for a Stalinist new system for training doctors in the National Health Service. The phrase is a perfect example of newspeak. To oppose a "modern" system is to be a conservative, if not a reactionary.

Yet, like all systems of centralised planning, this one has proved inefficient, inflexible and inhumane. It is an object lesson in the dangers of the ever growing capture of hitherto autonomous professions and institutions by the state.

First, the department resolved on seizing control over medical training from the professional colleges and consultants, who happen to know what doctors can (and should be able to) do.

Second, the bureaucrats made a mess of manpower planning: in England, for example, 29,200 doctors have been competing for the 15,600 training places they arbitrarily decided to create.

Third, they chose this moment of upheaval to introduce an inflexible and characteristically defective computerised system (the Medical Training and Application System) to allocate doctors across the country.

To put the point bluntly, these highly trained professionals, on whom you may depend for your lives or those of your loved ones, are being treated with contempt. Do you want to be looked after by someone so treated?

And now Labour is suggesting that after shunting doctors off to all points of the compass they have to struggle to find their own accommodation. The disaster that is labour's incompetent stewardship of the NHS continues to lurch to new levels of incredulity.