UK Medical Profession Dips Into Chaos

Aaron Singh -- This past two weeks, the UK medical profession has been in turmoil. Senior doctors have been outraged, junior doctors have been driven to tears, and medical students (including yours truly) have been filled with fear for their futures. All this because a storm months in the brewing has finally hit us. It goes by the benign-sounding name Modernising Medical Careers (MMC).

MMC is the brainchild of the Department of Health, and was proposed to reform the training of junior doctors in the UK. It culminated in the Medical Training Applications Service (MTAS), which required all junior doctors, regardless of the jobs they currently held, to fill out an application form more akin to a Communications Skills exam. They weren’t even allowed to submit their CVs or portfolios. The method has since come under heavy fire for its many flaws, chief among them allocating a tiny percentage of marks to applicants’ academic grades and experience, and mainly being a test of creative writing. I provide a sample question for your amusement:

Describe a recent example from your surgical experience of a time when you found it difficult to make an effective judgment in a challenging situation. How did you overcome this difficulty, and how has this experience informed your subsequent practice?

Based on your answers to questions like the one above, you are then offered interviews by the four deaneries of your preference. But the total number of jobs available through this system means that, come August, 8000 junior doctors will find themselves without jobs.

On results day, the MTAS computer system crashed multiple times. Junior doctors in hospitals throughout the country found themselves without answers and had their suspense prolonged. Doctors found themselves with interviews for jobs they didn’t apply for. Some application forms went missing. All in all, the system was a huge letdown; as the British Medical Association put it, “a shambles”.

Entire careers. Jobs. Families. Dreams. Ambitions. All dependent on whether you can write waffle well enough in answer to those questions to get the job you want, where you want it. Since then MTAS has come under heavy fire from the medical profession. Newspaper headlines have highlighted it. Members of Parliament and prominent politicians have spoken out against it. Most of the medical Royal Colleges have criticised it. Indeed, several deaneries involved in MTAS itself have withdrawn in protest. And some of the countries’ best doctors and researchers, including a few of my lecturers here in Cambridge, have signed a letter to the Department of Health expressing their disgust with the seemingly carefree way MTAS is messing with doctors’ careers.

This Friday, a white coat ‘March in March’ has been planned, where doctors from all over the country will march from the Royal College of Physicians to the Royal College of Surgeons in London to protest this treatment. Over a thousand doctors are expected to attend.

As a medical student, most of this is still over my head. But it makes me fearful. Very fearful. Imagine all that work, all those years of slogging through med school, all those years on the wards, all going down the drain. Reports of junior doctors bursting into tears on the job this week have been all over the news. Fortunately it seems that the government is starting to back down after all the uproar.

There might be a light at the end of the tunnel after all, but for now it seems quite dim.