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Modernising Medical Careers

The Health Secretary is nodding. In contrast, however, NHS Employers has at least some grip on reality. We learn from its leaked report of how it is desperately scratching around for jobs abroad to offer doctors that it recognises will be unemployed on 1 August. The NHS Employers briefing paper talks optimistically of service posts that have been converted by employers into training posts. How many of those have there been after Lord Warner’s announcement of 13 December, and how many more does the Minister anticipate? Other hon. Members have made that point already, and it is important that we know the numbers involved. While NHS Employers has been trawling the world to see where it can park unemployed British doctors, has it asked our EU neighbours how they might help? Given that many of the available training billets in the UK will be going to European economic area doctors, it seems reasonable to ask where the reciprocity is. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) spoke about banning European doctors, and that point may be germane here. Certainly, we recognise that the treaty obligations into which we entered—rightly or wrongly—forbid us from banning European doctors. That is simply not possible, but NHS Employers might consider Europe as it trawls around the world. Many Labour Members have been greatly exercised in the past by unpaid researchers attached to MPs’ staffs. In a like manner, are they not concerned that officials are entertaining a scheme to hive unemployed junior doctors off into voluntary service overseas? What would be the precise terms of such an arrangement? Heaven for junior doctors will be a place on a run-through training programme. The Government are saying, ““Get that and you’re well on your way to consultant status, in due course. Fail and you’re set for a grisly series of fixed-term specialist training appointments, so-called locum appointments for training, a re-run of your second foundation year?—how depressing must that be?—““undefined academic appointments of the sort we thought MMC was designed to address, professional ‘locumming’ and a constellation of low-grade, non-training jobs. You’ll be part of your postgraduate dean’s euphemistically styled ‘talent pool’, to be fished out when something vaguely suitable turns up.? I hope that that ““something suitable? does not involve working in a supermarket, as happened to the constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries). The lost tribe of senior house officers is set to become nomadic as they drift from hopeless job to hopeless job with little chance of breaking out, in stark contrast to the previous flawed, but far less rigid, milieu. It is little wonder that so many dedicated, expensively skilled professionals are set to quit the UK and the NHS, and even to quit medicine altogether, as my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, Central (Mr. Pelling) pointed out. The Health Secretary’s fulsome apology last week was indeed appropriate, but junior doctors facing the prospect of being hung out to dry want to know why she is not joining them.