NHS doctor recruitment is a shambles

[1BodyProblem]

NC. A relative of mine is a qualified doctor who has now applied to go through training to be a radiologist. This recruitment is done centrally in England so he went though application and interviews recently. Yesterday he got offered a radiology job. Great celebrations and calls to friends and relatives. While he was preparing to go to a celebratory dinner the recruitment office emailed to withdraw the offer at around 6.30 in the evening. An email address you can't reply to. Thing is he had also declined other jobs in surgery to accept his radiology job. Turns out it was actually a nationwide error in England and Wales and all of the candidates were incorrectly ranked on an interview score and not on a portfolio score which should have been included.

All the doctors in the country offered radiology training jobs have all had these offers withdrawn now and have to try to pick up the pieces of disappointment and try to "undecline" other jobs they turned down which may be too late.

This is such a shambles and no NHS managers will ultimately take responsibility despite it potentially wrecking careers. So angry on his behalf!

Do the public realise how badly these doctors are treated ?

Do the public also realise that new doctors straight out of medical school get appointed by random allocation? That's right, nothing to do with their university performance, extra publications, research or summer job experience- it's random. Anywhere in the UK. Worse than being in the military.

I suspect that most people have no idea just how awful things are. I know about it from twitter, but I have alot of friends who are Dr's and so follow lots of them on twitter so see all the med twitter posts.

This is just another disaster in a long line of disasters. The most recent before this being people who'd been told they'd passed/failed crucial exams two years ago suddenly being told their results were wrong.

Hopefully the BMA will be able to force them to uphold the offers given, or at least let people opt back in to other specialities that they turned down on the basis of their radiology offer.

this has been going on for years! I found out that my offer was withdrawn by voicemail in 2007 - apparently they'd over-allocated candidates to jobs. That was a fortnight before the job was due to start and as i was planning to move into hospital accommodation for a while it also left me homeless...which was nice.

I was told about that shambles. Doctors who were told they passed a key postgraduate exam 1.5 years ago (the second part of a three part exam) were then casually emailed to said they had failed. All these doctors that retrospectively failed then suddenly hadn't passed the qualification and were ineligible for jobs they were already working in ?!! Wtf??!

Oh my goodness cannot believe there has been another cock up. ANRO the anaesthetic national recruitment office has also made several muck ups in recent years as well as the MRCP exam fiasco another poster has already mentioned

A total cock up which needs to be widely publicised. People responsible need to be made accountable. My daughter was nervously waiting today to see where she was going to be allocated for specialist training. She received an email to say that there is a delay for all applicants. These doctors have waited for months to find out very important decisions about their future careers and are now left hanging.

This stuff should be headline news

I've heard about it in the past from business news but in general, I don't think people know how mad our systems are.

So what's the solution?

What the actual fuck? So soon after the MRCP exam wrong results scandal? Are they actively trying to drive our residents abroad?

It’s awful, I am so angry on their behalf, especially after the recent MRCP results scandal too. I’m planning my nhs exit plan as we speak…

@mumda Solution is that competent people are required to use the best and most appropriate data systems available. Radiology applicants were given offers on Monday then had them withdrawn.
If this was A level results it would be all over the news.

Where are the journalists when we need them?

There a lot wrong with the uk doctor training program. It needs remedying.

A scandal that this isn't done better, absolutely. The people managing this process need to be better. It must be an insanely complicated job.

I just think it's ironic that these are the people who are also, in other parts of this site and the wider media, decried as "pointless overpaid bureaucrats who should all be sacked so we can have more frontline staff".

How can NHS managers be simultaneously a complete waste of salary that should be trimmed out of a bloated health service, and also responsible for complex processes that cause chaos if they go wrong? Maybe in fact these roles are underpaid because they require the kinds of wizzkid minds that can command 6 figure salaries in the Financial Services Sector to actually get a thousand-dimension logic-puzzle right every time, but the NHS managerial roles with their basic salaries aren't sufficiently competitive to attract the most capable people?