Now they know
The press catch up with the leaked MTAS options document with an acknowledgement from its author Sian Thomas of the document’s authenticity.
The Guardian, the Telegraph & the Times get stuck in along with the BBC.
The document, Maximising Employment Opportunities, confirmed that there was a 10,000 “excess of applicants for training posts over places”.
Sian Thomas, the deputy director of NHS Employers, said that it was disappointing that the review group’s discussions were being leaked.
Does this convince anyone that the Review Group’s deliberations should be public as I have been calling for?
What else is going on that we haven’t been told about?
And are these the plans that the BMA signed up to on the 6th of April?
Channel 4 focusses on the 10000 doctors expected to be unemployed:
A spell volunteering in the African bush or an Indian village is considered life-enhancing. But not meant to be a solution to mass unemployment.
The Daily Mail gets in with:
We import doctors to prop up the NHS, then tell our jobless junior staff to work abroad for charity.
It now seems ironic that having taken doctors from Third World countries, the NHS wants to send medics it has trained itself at huge cost to these very places.
The extent of the crisis caused by botched reforms of medical training is laid bare in leaked documents from NHS Employers, the organisation responsible for implementing the changes.
Remedy UK had this to say:
“A lot of us want to work overseas voluntarily - not to compensate for a failed Government policy. It’s no substitute for proper training and a career in the NHS and shows how desperate the employers are.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health said:
“We have no plans to arrange for trainee doctors from the NHS to do voluntary service with VSO and we do not expect thousands of doctors currently working in the NHS to be facing unemployment in August.”
Yes, obfuscation works so well indeed! I wonder who they think will believe this rubbish.