Scott’s Spiel

Happy St Partick’s Day to all those who celebrate it. I’m sure the Guinness is flowing in by now. Shame the weather is so miserable.

Today also happens to be the day that the junior docs are taking to the streets of London and Glasgow. The marches, organised by Remedy UK, are in protest of the recent shambles in the first run of MTAS for ST positions. I realise this means nothing to those who haven’t spent the hours into understanding the employment of doctors in the UK, so I’ll indulge in a brief explanation.

For a while now, the government has been saying we need more consultants. Everyone wants a consultant to be treating them, so we need more. Their way of increasing consultants was to make junior docs specialise earlier and provide more linear training model. The answer was Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), which looks a bit like this:

Nice and simple. When people leave medical school, they apply for Foundation posts. After 2 years of Foundation posts, they apply for a speciality training (ST) post which varies in the length. Successful completion of ST results in a Certificate of Completion of Training (CCT) allowing them to apply for consultant posts. That’s the basics to it. The problem is there has to be some way of moving all the current docs onto this new system. The way the government decided to do this was by making people reapply for what they might already being doing and start the new scheme fully in August 2007.

Being modern, computerised systems are the logical choices for applications. MTAS is the way junior docs now apply for posts. No CVs. Instead, you’re asked a few questions and they are the deciding factor whether or not you get an interview. When the deadline came for applicants to find out whether they got an interview or not, the good old computer system crashed. Thirty-thousand people is quite a lot for a system to handle. When people eventually discovered their results, many received no interviews. A number received 1 and few received more than 1. Those who received more than 1 often found them on the same day in opposite parts of the country. Those who received none were offered no feedback on why. It was quite a mess.

Then a group of consultants who were meant to be shortlisting candidates for interview refused to do so. Slight problem for the governement there and they ordered a review. What changes it will bring we’ll need to wait and see. But I wish luck to those junior docs who’re on the streets today…we don’t want to loose so many excellent doctors.

I hope this is an appropriate enough sum-up of what’s going on. I apologise to any readers who have a good knowledge of what’s going on and feel this is over simplified.

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You can see an initial report on the march at Dr Crippen’s blog.