One of the all-time great administrative cock-ups
Or so the Financial Times classes MTAS / MMC as anyway & who is to say that they are wrong?
It is has left 30,000 junior doctors bitterly disillusioned and angry. But it also has big potential implications for patient care.
33,000 applicants but there are a lot more concerned doctors around, not just juniors.
Highly-qualified junior hospital doctors are quitting the National Health Service for jobs in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere following the fiasco over a new application system for training jobs that has left many without an interview.
The British Medical Association released a survey of 650 doctors yesterday showing that 55 per cent would be likely to seek a training opportunity overseas if their current applications were not successful.
Almost 5 per cent had already had overseas offers. This raised the possibility that many would take four- or five-year training posts that would deprive the NHS of their services for at least that long and perhaps their whole careers, the BMA said.
If anything, the BMA underestimates the anger people are feeling. It also does not take into account those who simply refused to take part in the MTAS humiliation & left the country early.
The threat is more than theoretical. Kate Bleasdale, chief executive of HCL, an agency that provides locum doctors, said it had already placed about 40 British doctors overseas since late last year, with demand strong from Australia, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates.
“We currently have about 100 doctors who are looking to move abroad and there is worldwide demand for healthcare staff,” she said.
This is one agency out of hundreds in the marketplace. Do the math.
The health department said it was not unusual for doctors to work abroad and the majority returned, “enriched by their experience”. The posts for which interviews were being conducted were “only training posts, and there are still jobs in the NHS for junior doctors who do not get a training place”, it said.
Take the person who said this out back & use a humane killer on him or her right now! You could hardly make matters worse.
But the BMA’s survey found two thirds of those polled would not consider this kind of service grade NHS job - which does not include any training.
It also found that 4.5% of the doctors surveyed have already had offers of posts overseas confirmed.
And 39% said they would seek medical employment outside the NHS, while 44% said they might leave medicine altogether.
The survey is published on the same day that the Conservatives are holding an opposition debate on the situation.
Grassroots doctors’ organisation Remedy UK is also set to gather at least 500 doctors to lobby Parliament.
But why could the BMA only do this so late & with just 650 respondents? I am sure that Dr Morris Brown’s survey will have no such problems.
Dr. Jacky Davis from the NHS Consultants Association rebuts a previous article by Michael White:
One of the reasons the NHS is in such a parlous state is that this government has deliberately disempowered the profession - by sidelining the royal colleges, by downsizing hospitals and by medical unemployment. NHS work is being diverted to private companies and doctors’ roles replaced by non-medically-qualified practitioners. The Modernising Medical Careers team is to produce “fit for purpose doctors” - the only question being “fit for whose purpose?” The recent job-application debacle is just the latest example of government not listening to professional advice. Doctors at all levels are now working to salvage something from a mess not of their own making.
There has been no meaningful involvement of the profession in the frenetic and incoherent reforms, yet we are the ones who have to treat patients in an atmosphere of creative destruction. The morale of all doctors is low. Junior doctors are considering emigration and senior ones early retirement. The government may achieve its aim of disempowering doctors, but the end result will be a disaster for patients.
I think I have said the above often enough.
But Lord Warner will have none of it.
Lord Warner - who had responsibility for health service reform - insisted that the Government’s changes were necessary to improve all aspects of the NHS and would not be stopped.
The peer criticised NHS staff for resisting the need for change, amid growing dissent over the way the Government’s reforms are being pushed through.
Lectures from someone who does not acknowledge his mistakes or his own lack of understanding.
His comments on the woeful performance of the NPfIT contracts show no sign of understanding the issues.
Developing training and administrative systems was an issue, along with an unwillingness to “embrace” the government’s £12bn IT upgrade for the NHS, according to Lord Warner.
“The idea that we could carry on with a paper-based NHS forever is nonsense, but a lot of the staff have been very slow to embrace the idea that you could have an electronic patient record and that you could move information about people faster,” he said.
I repeat, it never was about a luddite tendency among the staff. The way in which systems were designed & contracts signed ignoring staff concerns with no notice taken of the unsuitability of the proposed solutions to actual requirements was the biggest cause of unhappiness.
Turbulent days ahead for London I am afraid, as he takes the helm of the Provider Development Agency.