DH acknowledge junior doctor selection 'shortcomings'

12 Mar 2007

An extremely rapid DH initial review into the heavily criticised online junior doctor recruitment system has within 24-hours admitted that there were ‘shortcomings’ that need to be addressed.

Following threats of boycotting the system from consultants, the review team which was set up on Friday announced on Saturday a series of changes to the system for allocating specialist training posts, which include allowing applicants to provide CVs and portfolios to support their applications.

As a result, some junior doctors who have expressed fears that they have been overlooked in the first round, will be given the opportunity to have their application form reviewed by a trained advisor from a Deanery. Successful candidates will then be given an interview.

In addition to this, 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 DH has promised that its new revised approach will 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.

Health Minister Lord Hunt said: “I welcome this review and thank everyone on the team who worked so hard to find a way forward. I know that this has been a difficult time for junior doctors and I hope that this reassures them that we have listened to their concerns, and that our goal is the same as theirs: to find the right people for the right jobs for the benefit of the NHS, its patients and its staff.”

However, the British Medical Association’s Junior Doctors Committee have called for the web-based application system to be scrapped and for an independent enquiry to be held into the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS).

Dr Jo Hilborne, chair of the Junior Doctors Committee said: “Junior doctors are very angry at the current chaos. We have strong evidence that thousands of highly skilled doctors risk being thrown on the scrapheap by this shambles of a system. We have been warning Government for over a year that this system wasn’t going to work and that’s why we think it necessary to call a halt until the process is got right."

“We will continue to play our part on the recent Review Group which is trying to put things right but we want an independent inquiry to be started immediately to learn the lessons of how this mess was allowed to happen and produce a longer-term solution.“

Over 30.000 junior doctors are chasing 22,000 available places under the MTAS selection process.

Reader's Comments

I think that it is worse than this!

13 Mar 07 23:29

It is an open secret that the site was down for 15 hours mid process for KSS and London to be amalgamated into one "UoA", and this meant that online scoring could not be done. Queries must have been rewritten swiftly, and new queries to generate reports. The software would not allow the candidate's unique ID to be printed onto the forms, so these were hand written onto over 120,000 applications, each of several sheets! With well over 30,000 doctors applying for up to 16 specialties at three years of seniority, the potential for a couple of badly written lines of program to wreak havoc was there! It is reported that some excellent doctors have missed out on interviews, whilst doctors in the same group applying for the same jobs, but recognised to be "less good" got up to their maximum 4 interviews!! Now if the queries and reports had resulted in Dr Hyde's front sheet having Dr Jekyll's answers, then Dr Hyde would miss the interview, and Dr Jeckll would get through on the strenght of Dr Hyde's answers. If this happened for all candidates who included KSS or London in their applications, this would generate about 20,000 wrongly scored applications. Now none of the scorers saw a "whole" application - only 1 to 3 questions and answers each - none saw the name of the candidate - only the had written number ........ result the most radical action by a group of Consultants since the founding of the NHS, when the West Midlands Consultants biycotted a surgical appointments panel. Doctors are not radical by nature - sounds like something bad went wrong?