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Modernising Medical Careers

There is only one way for my hon. Friend to explain that to his constituents: it is chronic mismanagement of the national health service by the Government. It was the Government’s intention to continue the expansion of consultant posts, but that has been torpedoed by the mismanagement of finances and deficits in the health service so that across the NHS posts have been frozen, consultant posts have disappeared and specialist consultants in some specialties cannot find posts. The consequence is seen not only in the impact on Horton hospital in my hon. Friend’s constituency, but across the country. The increase in medical school output or in the number of junior doctors coming through would have been consistent in due course with a larger throughput into consultant posts, but the Government’s attitude is that those consultant posts have been lost for financial reasons and they are cutting back on the hospital sector, so they want to maintain a tight bottleneck at the point at which junior doctors enter the further reaches of specialty training. They are stopping the flow, and they are literally forcing large numbers of doctors to leave the country. The Government may believe that the doctors who will leave this country will be those who came from overseas in the first place, but that is not how it is working out. It is an arbitrary system. The scoring system, recruitment and application system have been made ““objective? in a way that has become virtually arbitrary. Those who are selecting candidates for posts across the country were unable in the initial process to see anything like sufficient of the clinical experience, the academic achievements and the character of the candidates presented to them. It turned into a scoring system in which someone could literally—and I have evidence in my file—pay £129, go on a course, and be told how to answer the questions to be selected for interview. That is utterly outrageous.