Taking a scythe to a generation
The horror that is MTAS has come to pass & there is mayhem in the land.
Is this a system you would entrust your future to?
This new system has turned all of the old indicators of what makes a ‘good candidate’ on their head. It doesn’t matter any more which university you went to, what class your degree was, where or with whom you have been trained, how hard you worked, how much you impressed your senior colleagues, whether you actually care for your patients, how much love and effort you put into your work, how easy you are to get on with, whether you are a good learner, whether you have any spark, personality or ambition and so and so on.
All that matters now is your ability to bullshit the answer (in 150 words) to questions such as:
“Mistakes can and do happen in medical practice. Describe a specific example where the outcome of action you took in response to a clinical mistake/error (made by you or someone else) caused you to reassess how you subsequently dealt with similar situations. What action did you take at the time and how has your practice now changed?”
Read it carefully. What is it asking? How are you going to condense the answer into 150 words?
A good answer to this question is worth more points towards getting an interview than having spent 3/4 years completing a PhD in one of the world’s leading universities, studying the speciality to which you have applied.
Who would you prefer to have treating you? A good bullshitter or a highly trained doctor who may well know as much about your disease than anyone in the world?
Anyone, sufficiently coached, can answer the above question perfectly. You don’t need any medical experience, the scenario doesn’t even have to be real. Who the hell could ever check?
What makes this even more galling is that the ‘mark schemes’ for questions such as the one above have been leaked to a chosen number of candidates in advance of the application deadline. They, but none else, knew that the question above could only score full marks if the mistake described was your own, not someone else’s. Read the question again. Did it say describe your mistake? Or did say ‘yours or someone else’s?
Add to this the completely shambolic manner in which the applications were scored. Website crashes, supposedly anonymous applications with names visible, an online system reverting to old fashioned paper print-outs, non-trained assessors dragged in at the last minute to shift through forms, consultants scoring hundreds of forms in the final hours before the shortlisting deadline, deadlines missed, people hanging in limbo, ‘final data check in progress’, people officially advised to apply for the wrong training level, people for the whom the right training level doesn’t exist and available posts being a fraction of those in previous years.
In my speciality, in the hospital I work at the moment (Oxford), 100 people applied for 3 jobs. There were 8 available in “London, Kent, Surrey and Sussex”, 1 in Bristol (60 applicants), 2 in Leeds, 2 in Newcastle. If you are prepared to take a job ’somewhere in Scotland’ there were another 9 or so. Choose 4 of the above & good luck.
Currently we don’t know whether there will be a similar number of jobs next year, or whether most of them will be ring-fenced for people who came in at a lower level this year. ‘They’ simply haven’t told us. In reality this is because they haven’t decided.
Training programmes in English speaking countries worldwide are about to be bombarded with very highly qualified medical graduates. Not wanting to go too far from home, I am seriously thinking about which European language I need to start learning while I’m doing my PhD over the next 2/3 years.
The best student from my comprehensive school in north Liverpool, 5 grade As at A-level, Cambridge undergraduate degree and medical training, raced through post-grad exams in minimum possible time, universally esteemed by my consultants, a bit quiet and serious but mostly get on with the nurses, research done, papers in, prizes won, courses attended, PhD in Oxford. Currently being trained by the country’s (if not the world’s) experts in the field I want to work. I know my patients like me and I like them. Dr Crippen would be impressed with my communication skills & empathy (I think, but very hard to prove in 150 words).
Today I realised that this country doesn’t want or need me anymore.
A couple of other posts about MTAS.
As I said previously, it is open season on the medical profession at the moment & they are being treated worse than lab rats with nary an apology. I know that this presumption that psychotic mumbo-jumbo can help select good candidates is common enough in certain rarefied professions & in business but was thankfully kept out of the health service - until now. And as for the “leaders of the profession” who did not stand up to be counted in opposition & indeed acquiesced in the dirty work, ……………..
Reposting from earlier, because I can ……
Choose MMC. Choose MTAS. Choose a region. Choose a career. Choose a fxxxing big lottery. Choose portfolios, on-line application forms and years of uncertainty. Choose a cut in training posts, career choice and job security. Choose FTSTA’s no one knows anything about, middle grade rotas being run by juniors who’ve never worked in the speciality before, foundation programmes you have no control over, and hospitals you don’t want to work in. Choose being treated by ‘trained doctors’ rather than ‘doctors in-training’, even though the average consultants training hours have been cut from 40,000 to 10,000. Choose Hospital At Night and no-one knowing the patients anymore. Choose being an SHO lost in the middle of it all, with nothing but a sparsely updated web-site to inform yourself. Choose seniors who know nothing about the system and seem powerless to influence it. Choose an internal office with no windows in your brand new PFI hospital while the doors fall off and middle managers sit in their swanky boardrooms munching on biscuits that your taxes are paying for. Choose paying £10 a day for the privilege of parking at your work-place while you work non-compliant rotas and get bullied into lying on your EWTD monitoring forms. Choose sitting at that PC filling-in mind-numbing, spirit-crushing objective assessment questionnaires. Choose PMETB-approved curricula and competency-based assessments no-one has properly validated. Choose your third choice career path and wondering who the fxxk you are on a busy post-take ward-round. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable Non-Consultant Career Grade post, nothing more than an embarrassment to the under-experienced, ‘fit for purpose’ FY’s you’ve trained to replace yourself.
Choose not to choose your future.
Choose MMC.