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Modernising Medical Careers

I am pleased to be able to contribute to the debate because, like other Members, I have received many letters from constituents, many of whom are directly involved in the process or who have brothers or sisters or more distant relatives who are directly involved in it. Many of them have been extremely concerned about what has happened. I wish to take this opportunity briefly to express some of their concerns in their own words. Many described the process that they have been through as ““shambolic?. One said that, essentially, it was like a ““creative writing exercise?, and wrote of his colleagues:"““One wonders why they bothered to commit so much time and energy to a profession to have their ambitions potentially shattered in a flawed process. Many of our junior doctors at my hospital are in a worse position and have no interviews and nothing to hope for at all.?" Another correspondent says that the online application form is ““riddled with error? and that the"““process is spectacularly breaking down?." She described the form as:"““A series of 8 tree-hugging questions with 150 word answers?" and that that"““replaced any common sense when it came to qualifications, aptitude, and professionalism in order to assess the candidate. Any idiot could have answered those questions well.?" Clearly, we do not want idiots to take up such important positions. Other people talk about the system crashing when they tried to fill in their applications. One described their first interview, which was in Manchester on 16 March:"““I took along my portfolio and my cv and offered to show it to the interview panel and they told me that it would not be necessary.?" How can we expect good recruitment decisions to be taken when CVs are not even looked at? Another person who got in touch with me was a candidate in a Birmingham interview session which was cancelled at the last minute. Another described the system as a"““vastly unfair, harsh, draconian punitive selection procedure?" that has been imposed"““on all junior doctors within the UK. Lives are being destroyed as we speak and the UK will lose its brightest and best doctors of a generation if it is not stopped.?" Those are the kinds of impact that the system that we are debating has had on junior doctors. Many relatives are equally concerned. A father got in touch with me about his daughter. He describes the situation as"““nothing short of a disgrace. The future loyalty to the NHS of these young people on whom we shall depend will have been lost. They have absolutely no confidence that they will be fairly treated now or in the future.?" Many Members have been made aware of similar cases involving people who had spent many years training to become doctors and who had almost got to the final hurdle only to find that it had been taken away; they were not even allowed to jump over it at the beginning of this unfolding shambles. The situation is depressing. Getting the Government to take action has been like pulling teeth—to use a medical simile. Over a period of several months, the Minister and the Secretary of State have had to come back to the House to continue to explain what is happening in respect of this unfolding disaster. One clear way that we can tackle this matter and give some genuine confidence to the junior doctors who are listening to the debate, and to those who will read about it tomorrow in Hansard, is to vote for the motion before the House. That will give them the confidence that the necessary training posts will be in place over the next few years to help us work through this crisis in a measured way, which is what we need to do. I want to ask the Secretary of State about the Tooke review. It is obviously easier—and, given the judgment calls already made by the Department, more appropriate—to get out of this mess by subcontracting it out to Sir John Tooke. However, in her opening speech the Secretary of State said that Sir John might make recommendations to the House earlier than August if he considers it appropriate to do so. Why is that not her decision? Surely it is appropriate for junior doctors to know much sooner what is going to be done about this problem, rather than having to wait until the end of the summer. By that time, many will have already taken alternative decisions about their careers. People cannot just put their lives on hold until this Government manage to talk their way out of this shambles. I have another question for the Secretary of State and for the ministerial team who have been involved in this process. What will happen if Sir John Tooke’s review uncovers further problems, if the shambles develops in an even more dramatic way and, as my hon. Friends have suggested, we get to August and many junior doctors are left redundant? What will it take for the Secretary of State to say that enough is enough regarding her and her team’s role, and to take voluntary redundancy, which many people in her Department have done? Whose career prospects are being damaged more—the Secretary of State’s, or those of the many junior doctors who will not get a second bite of the cherry, once they have lived through this shambles? This is not good enough, and it certainly is not the best year ever for the NHS and the doctors whom we have been discussing today. The NHS has been fundamentally financially mismanaged in the past decade. As an accountant, I was astonished to see financial boom in the NHS followed by bust. Such boom and bust is largely responsible for the destabilisation of recruitment in the NHS—an issue far broader than the catastrophe that MTAS has created. How many more shambles have to occur before the Secretary of State takes genuine responsibility, instead of continually subcontracting Government policy out to other people and putting off taking decisions? The situation is urgent for those involved; they have not got until August to wait for answers. If the motion before the House is accepted, that would at least provide them with some certainty about their roles and what will happen in the coming years. It would give us the chance to take a thorough look at what has gone wrong, and to consider in detail what needs to be done. As I have said before, as someone who has been in business I know that when many different issues unravel over time one needs to take a step back and to look at the fundamentals of what is going wrong. However, our junior doctors cannot wait for an holistic review process. We need to give them some certainty by voting for the motion before us. Having read this debate in tomorrow’s Hansard, not many people will have much confidence in this Government and their ability to deliver and work their way through these dramatic problems. It is not just doctors who are concerned about the recruitment process. I have no doubt that many nurses throughout the country who are finishing their training courses will be shuddering at the prospect of the process that they will have to go through to find a job over the summer months. It is not good enough to be told that we are having a review, and that there will be no answers before August. The Secretary of State referred in her opening speech to creating some additional training posts. It is incumbent on her to give the House a sense tonight of the number of such posts. What is the approximate number? What is too low, and what is unrealistically high? That is what we and junior doctors need to know. I doubt whether many of us have much confidence in the management team at the very top of the Department of Health. Frankly, the sooner that that team is changed and we have people who can run professionally an organisation that so many of us depend on—whether we work in it or are treated by it—the better.