BMA warns of medical skills drain
Tuesday, 26 Sep 2006 11:26
Doctors could look overseas for jobs, BMA warns
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New training programmes for doctors could force a skills drain away from the NHS, the British Medical Association (BMA) has warned.
A year is needed, the BMA argues, to alter the schemes to ensure that they will not deter trainee medics.
Reforms to training are to be introduced under the Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) specialist programmes, yet the BMA believes that the intensity of competition for the schemes will drive trainee doctors elsewhere.
In two months' time the government will advertise 9,500 entry points to the MMC programmes but more than twice that number are expected to apply for them.
A survey conducted by the BMA found that, were they unable to obtain a training post, more than half of junior doctors would consider going overseas and over 40 per cent would consider leaving medicine altogether.
Under its Train Not Drain campaign the BMA is calling on the government to delay the reforms by a year to enable the creation of extra training posts.
Further problems with the MMC programmes highlighted by the BMA today include a short period for thousands of interviews to take place in, NHS trusts not having the IT infrastructure to support the new recruitment process and doctors not having enough careers guidance about the specialities.
Dr Jo Hilborne, chairman of the BMA junior doctors committee, said: "Medical training does need to be reformed, but not at the price of an exodus from the NHS. The cost of training a doctor to this level is around a quarter of a million pounds.
"It would be a terrible waste of both talent and taxpayers' money if any doctor abandoned the profession simply because the government stuck to an arbitrary timetable."
Responding to the BMA's call, a spokesperson for the Department of Health (DoH) said that delaying the implementation of the MMC programmes would bring "confusion to the system and greater uncertainty to doctors in training".
Rather than doctors going overseas, the DoH wants them "to progress and develop their careers in the NHS where we see them as our doctors of the future".
The spokesperson added: "Discussions are currently taking place between postgraduate deans and employers to establish the number of training places that will be available in the new structure. We are confident there will be many more than 9,500 as quoted by the BMA."