Pyrrhic “victory”
Another day, another claim of victory. This process is starting to remind me of Iraq & the numerous victory celebrations it attracted.
I am not convinced that this “victory” is any such thing.
The Academy of Royal Colleges has recommended that the MTAS recruitment piffle be scrapped but only for the second round! Do they really expect people to take them seriously, especially when the first round will continue under the same process that they have just condemned? Holding additional interviews after manually reviewing the applications & CV’s of candidates who did not get shortlisted but with the same numbers of posts is a crap-shoot.
And given that most of the good training posts will have been filled in the first round of interviews with only a few left over for May with a preponderance of FTSTA’s, do they really think that they have done justice to the complaints?
What the review needed to have done was to look at the workforce assumptions & figure out why there were only 12500 odd training posts for 30000 applicants.
Why there were too few standalone FTSTA posts for the rest? Why were those who did not get into speciality training this time, especially SAS doctors have barriers placed in their way for future applications with an inadequate number of posts? And why the entry point into the ST3 grade was limited to just a few positions with little to no hope of doing so in the future. Why not think radically about it & make entry onto the Specialist Register open to all those who can demonstrate competency, not just ones in defined training posts?
Why doctors planning to get off the conveyer belt that is MMC with a change in speciality or who seek to move from the SAS grades to training positions have been barred from doing so?
Why is the red-herring of immigration & overseas doctors being brought into this, especially after the disgraceful treatment of them by the government in the last year?
This review is not good enough & is being publicised as a distraction from the real problems with MMC. But the air of inevitability around MMC is gone & the immense amount of anger among doctors is the best opportunity to force a rethink.
There have been interminable hearings by the Commons Health Select Committee into workforce planning in the NHS. Can we actually get some sense & an acceptance of responsibility from those luminaries who appear before it?
A battle might have been won, not the war.
What is needed is a root & branch review of the entire edifice of MMC.
It is up to the profession not to fall for the same trick twice.
While they are at it, can the Academy also do something about their web-site, like maybe get a decent one?
The rather confused reporting of this serves to illustrate. No one can seem to agree what the victory was.
The review group has met twice. We have identified shortcomings in the process. We have decided that the first round should continue but we have recommended immediate steps to strengthen the interview process. These have been communicated to Deans and will be communicated to all applicants and selectors as soon as possible via the MTAS and MMC web-sites. An understanding of existing PMETB principles (para 5) clarifies guidelines for interviews at ST2 and ST3.
The review has identified concerns that some excellent doctors may have been overlooked. The group has recommended all applicants who have not been invited to an interview should be given the opportunity to have their application form reviewed by a trained advisor. This may result in the offer of a first round interview.
Significant changes will be made to improve selection in the second round. This will include changes to the application form and the scoring system. The Department has accepted the need for change and the revised approach will now be:
- tested with junior doctors, selectors, deanery recruitment teams and employers, and
- agreed with the Medical Royal Colleges, Deans, trainee and consultant representatives and employers before they are introduced.
What is this doing in here ? Where exactly has it been flagged as a problem & is it being used to scapegoat a sub-section of applicants?
Where selection panels are checking the immigration status of an applicant, this should also be clearly identified as separate from the elements of the interview to be scored. Further to the guidance issued by the Department of Health last Friday, 23 February, we are told that further guidance regarding the documentation that doctors need to bring to interviews for verification of their immigration status will be issued very shortly (hopefully today).
The Telegraph considers this a second chance, after a second climb-down by the Department of Health
The Royal College of Surgeons said in a statement yesterday: “The Department of Health has agreed to re-run the first round of the Medical Training and Application Service (MTAS) [for surgeons] to make sure all worthy candidates will be short-listed.
“Surgeons will now use full CVs and the customary structured interview to select candidates for jobs rather than relying on a computerised selection process which has clearly failed and has cause deep distress to both trainees and those tasked with their selection”.
The college said all previously selected candidates would still have their interviews but experienced doctors would go back and “examine in detail” candidates who were left out first time round.
The Guardian has no details of time-scale or process.
The review, led by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, took just three days to bin the online system, which was supposed to deliver a centralised and fairer application process. Junior doctors who have not got interviews in round one will be re-assessed the old way, through scrutiny of their CV and a structured interview.
The Daily Mail nearly gets it right.
In a humiliating U-turn, the Department of Health agreed to rerun the first round of its new system after a flood of complaints.
The embarrassing climb-down comes after consultants from across the country started refusing to carry out interviews, saying they had no confidence that the right candidates were being selected.
But there will still be 30,000 applicants vying for only 22,000 posts. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has met the presidents of the major medical royal colleges and has agreed to run the first round of the Modernising Medical Careers interview process again.
The computerised selection process which was being used has been scrapped.
Consultants will now use full CVs and the customary structured interview to select candidates for jobs.
All candidates who have been previously selected for interview will still be interviewed. But trained medical advisors will now go back and examine in detail the candidates who were left out first time round.
Those candidates potentially worthy of training posts will now re-enter the process and go forward to interview at no disadvantage.
Except as has been pointed out time & again, there are only 12500 training posts, not 22000.
Junior doctors who fear that they have been overlooked for the first round of interviews will be given the opportunity to have their application form reviewed by a trained adviser. Successful candidates will then be given an interview.
The BBC has Lord Hunt falling all over himself trying to apologise.
He told the BBC’s The World Tonight: “I’m certainly very sorry if junior doctors have been affected adversely in this way and that’s why, when it became apparent from the meetings that we had with doctors early in the week, we set up this review.
Funny how he did not seem to feel so here.
Lord Hunt, the health minister, denied doctors had been unfairly treated, and said many would have another chance to apply successfully.
“This system was designed with a huge input from doctors themselves. It did emphasise practical skills and competencies.
“Let me assure you that in the first round of appointments, only the candidates of very good quality will be appointed.
As it didn’t seem to be of concern here.
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s official spokesman said: “The important thing is that there are more doctors than before and that is part of the investment that has gone into the health service.
“In terms of people getting jobs, there are the usual processes in place to ensure that happens but that’s best done at an operational level.”
Well, this has shown just how good those processes are, demonstrating the standard we have come to expect & dread from this government, “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing“.
We’re training doctors for Australia. The Telegraph has an excellent opinion piece on the whole MMC chaos.
Gulp. I know a bit more about it now. The wretched and fallible system of online, anonymised, mass-application forms (accompanied by the usual crashing that you expect from any website run by gov.uk) has left thousands of highly qualified and experienced junior doctors with nowhere to go after July 31.
It’s not a competitive process; it’s a lottery. The short-listers know nothing about the applicants except what they have “scored” on the online application form.
Worse (for the doctors), neither Dr A nor Dr B know anything about the jobs they’re applying for. They have to accept an offer before they know what county it’s in, what the job description is, what the hours are or the salary scale (it can vary by 30 per cent). A proportion of the 22,000 places are fixed-term specialist-training appointments anyway. These jobs will provide the NHS with manpower, but they won’t lead to career progression, since they’re not official “training” posts.
There’s a widely held assumption that applications were sifted initially not by humans, but via an electronic crawler picking out keywords - touchy-feely kinds of buzzwords.
Though these doctors are called “junior”, they are the workhorses of the NHS: The ones you see at 3am; the ones who (in the words of one of the thousands of commentators to this paper’s website) “treat you, make decisions, resuscitate, thrombolyse, dialyse and often operate on you”. Some of the comments on the Telegraph website are bracing and cheering: “Please come to Canada! We’d love you all!”; “Ontario needs as many doctors as it can get.”; “We’re desperate for doctors in Western Australia.”; “Queensland is crying out for doctors.” Yes - well. Doctors cost £250,000 each to train - training that you and I have been paying for this past decade. Jolly nice to know they’re so valued in Australasia, Canada and America, but - give me strength.
Finally, if you’ll forgive a Kinnockian flourish, I warn you not to fall ill in the period between now and April 13, when the interviews will be going on. Or May, when the “second round” of applicants is hoping against dread hope. Or August, when the successful applicants will turn up at their “chosen” hospitals to start the next phase of their career. Some of them will be doctors who’d hoped to specialise in radiology, but have had to settle for something else instead. Poor them; poor you.
Still, as Lord Hunt says, the system will still be working well “in large parts of the country”. He must have meant Western Australia.
Watch one such effort here, you might be tempted.
March 16th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
[...] My views about the whole process are still the same. [...]