Consultants, please read

MTAS/MMC: time for a consultant boycott ( chrisallen) 09/04/2007, 10:33
This is an email I hope will reach as many consultants in the UK as possible: if you agree please forward to any consultants whose email address you know.
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What are your views on MTAS, the recently chaotic national junior doctor appointment system and what we as consultants should do about this now?

I feel that all consultants in all specialties should immediately cease to cooperate with interviews, shortlisting or helping in any way with the process in order to make it stop entirely and, as Morris Brown and his colleagues suggested, in the their letter to the Times, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/debate/letters/article1610358.ece, return to a fairer regionally based system, at least until a national system fit for purpose is instituted.

In my view the royal colleges and the BMA have seriously let us all down and in particular the young doctors that are the profession's future.

It is not just academic medicine that is under threat, in any case all medicine is academic to a degree and all consultants benefit from an academic component to their postgraduate education and training.

Since the royal colleges seem to have been so useless in this matter, in my view we should organise a boycott of the MTAS process now whilst there is still time for a return to a system of fair shortilisting, interviewing and selection. I am informed that Deaneries have contingency plans for a return to the previous well tried system of appointment. The neurologists in Bristol/Southwest region have already withdrawn comletely from MTAS.

I would be grateful for your views and if you could forward this mail to all the consultants in your address book (with a copy to me), even if you do not want to put your head above the parapet.

If you agree with this proposal can I suggest you contact you local deanery and tell them that you can not participate in the MTAS process; you will be glad to have the time to do some work I expect! If you don't want to be labelled as a bolshie, then I suggest you just say you haven't the time (which is probably true).

For a boycott to work we would need a large majority of consultants to take part in as many regions and as many specialties as possible, so please forward this to all your consultant colleagues in all specialties.

Best wishes

Chris Allen

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Dr CMC Allen MA MD FRCP
Dept of Neurology (Box 165)
Addenbrooke's Hospital
Cambridge CB2 2QQ
Tel: 01223 xxxxxxx
Fax: 01223 xxxxxxx
Email 1: cmca100@cam.ac.uk
Email 2: chris.allen@nhs.net