The joy of spring and the MTAS fiasco

I’m feeling very happy at the moment. I don’t really know why, maybe it’s because spring has its foot firmly in the door. Maybe it’s because England beat France on Saturday. Maybe it’s because I’ve just had a free weekend (a very rare thing for me at the moment) and the sun shone and I spent it drinking beer with friends. Maybe it’s because I spent a lot of time this weekend having sex with a beautiful woman. Whatever the reason, I think that, in general, life is going pretty well at the moment and not even the ongoing MTAS fiasco is dampening my mood.

You may or may not know about the way the government has tried to fuck up junior doctor’s training but in a nutshell, here’s what’s happening.

The government is sacking every junior doctor in the country on 31st July this year.

They are making us re-apply for the jobs we are already doing through the Medical Training Application Scheme (MTAS).

If you do not secure a job starting 1st August via MTAS, the system PREVENTS you from re-applying EVER again.

Due to a number of wholly predictable cock-ups, including lost documents, computer crashes and leaked marking schemes, MTAS has not worked. There are thousands of doctors who are not even being interviewed for the jobs they are already doing and doing well. This means they are staring down the barrel of unemployment and will either have to change careers (after between 7 and 10 years of medical training) or leave the NHS to practice medicine abroad.

It’s crazy.

Aphra Behn has put a more detailed guide to this debacle on her blog.

Unsurprisingly, this is causing a huge amount of stress, panic and misery among my colleagues; you can read about just how upset and angry some doctors are here, here, here, and here.

Fortunatley for me, I’ve managed to secure an interview for every position for which I’ve applied and the second of my interviews is tomorrow.

I have to say, I’m feeling very relaxed about it, which is sort of strange given the potential importance of tomorrow’s interview but, to be honest, I have no faith in this system and honestly do not believe that whether or not I get offered a job will have anything to do with how good a doctor I am.

It’s with these thoughts in mind that I’ll walk towards the interview panel tomorrow… and smile.

Wish me luck!