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Doctors take to the streets last Saturday (17th) over job fears |
Doctors on the street as 10,000 march for jobs
Fears that recruitment process will lead to high levels of unemployment
HUNDREDS of London doctors took to the streets to voice growing fears that a new government scheme is ruining the medical profession.
Concerned medics from all over the country met outside The Royal College of Physicians opposite Regent’s Park on Saturday to protest against the Specialist Training scheme Modernising Medical Careers (MMC).
The scheme, intended to revamp the current training and employment of doctors in the UK, has been heavily criticised for its “fatally flawed and bitterly unfair” IT selection process, which doctors claim ignores key qualities like experience and training in favour of communication skills.
Doctors from the Royal Free, the Whittington and St Bart’s hospitals joined more than 10,000 others in an internet-organised march to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in Holborn, to express concerns that 8,000 trained doctors will be jobless by this August if the change goes through.
The scheme also restricts applications for doctors’ posts to two set times a year, meaning that doctors denied their initial registrar’s post in January and overlooked by the subsequent “clearing” in April will have to wait an entire year before they can apply again for a job in their specialist field.
Dr Masood Ahmed, of the British Medical Association of Junior Doctors committee, said: “We’re losing excellent junior doctors because of this new system. The NHS deserves more, the public deserves more. Enough is enough. Today is the voice of junior doctors.”
Conservative Party leader David Cameron made an unplanned break in his schedule to be at the rally.
He called the MMC scheme “a shambles” and pledged to remind the government of its promise of a training post for every junior doctor.
Arun Iyer, 21, a fourth- year medical student at St Bart’s, said: “We’re all worried we’re not going to get jobs. Some of my friends have had to go abroad to find work, some just have no job.”
One former UCL medical student, Daisy Sandhu, who came all the way from Scotland for the march, said: “Forms have gone missing or are not being read, and experience is no longer taken into account. The system needs to be scrapped.
“You want someone to see your whole CV, not just one page. If you’re going to set up a new system, have a bit of respect for the people in it.”
Sarah Finer, a specialist registrar who also studied at UCL, thought that medics in central London were losing out even more than everyone else.
She said: “There’s a lot of people at UCL Queen Square doing fantastic work. One of the local strengths is that we have such strong research skills, but this carry no weight in the new system.
“People are not being judged on the qualities that are going to make them better doctors – it’s turned into a lottery. Doctors are not militant people on the whole, but this march shows the strength of feeling within the medical profession at the moment.”
Dr Clive Peedle, a Consultant Clinical Oncologist, accused the government of “disempowering and downgrading the medical profession”, but said that the 14 medical colleges, the hospitals and the post-graduate tutors must also be held responsible for allowing the scheme to go ahead. He said: “At best they have pandered to the government; at worst they have been complicit.
“The sleeping giant that is the NHS is now awake. We must get politicised and fight back.”
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