LONDON (Reuters), Jun 22 - Thousands of junior doctors face disappointment on Friday as the last few job offers are sent out for prized training posts across England.
As many as 32,000 medics have been chasing around 20,000 National Health Service training jobs, with Friday the final day of the current round of recruitment.
Doctors lobby groups say around a quarter of jobs remain unfilled, and the unsuccessful candidates will have to make fresh applications in a second round after August.
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has promised 215 more training posts and that hospital work of some kind will be found for all candidates so that they can apply again next year.
The process, which began back in January, has been marked by controversy after hundreds of well-qualified doctors failed to get even one interview in a new computerized application system known as MTAS.
In the ensuing row, all applicants were offered at least one interview but Hewitt was forced to apologize for the debacle.
The chairman of the doctors' union, the British Medical Association, resigned after he lost the support of his members over the jobs fiasco.
The uproar prompted the creation of two doctors' campaign groups, Remedy UK and Fidelio, to support junior doctors.
They have protested that the shortlisting and interviewing system was deliberately skewed to ignore academic achievement, the traditional way of advancing in a medical career.
In the first interviews, CVs were not formally considered, with applicants judged on a series of 150-word answers and ranked according to a predetermined scoresheet.
Matthew Daniels, an academically gifted 31-year-old hoping to combine cardiology and research into heart functions, was one of just 2 percent of applicants to get the maximum four interviews but failed to get a single training post.
Daniels had been hoping to move from his current job at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge to a training position in Oxford that would also enable him to apply for a clinical lectureship.
Instead he has only been offered a one-year training post at an unspecified hospital in northwest London that he says is a "dead end" job.
Daniels, who has a first class degree from Nottingham University, has won medical prizes and has had research published in leading scientific magazines, was told at one interview that his PhD did not count as an additional qualification as he was "already a doctor".
"A two day resuscitation course, open to everybody from paramedic level up was an additional qualification, however," he said.
"The current round of employment, the government and leaders of the medical profession have organized a system that makes people like me virtually unemployable."
Previously junior doctors applied to individual hospitals for training positions.
But under a reform of doctor training, called Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), medics this year all applied at the same time for jobs in a national system.
By Tim Castle
Last Updated: 2007-06-22 10:40:09 -0400 (Reuters Health)
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