Monday 12 February 2007

Piss poor

For anyone out there who thinks doctors are overpaid fat cats who selfishly exploit the NHS to gold-plate their BMWs- think again!

As a junior I know what it is really like and unfortunately our voice is rarely heard in the media.

After a several years training we start on a decent, although not magnificent salary, and attempt to start paying off our hefty student debts.

In the old days there was a carrot at the end of the string, unfortunately these days the carrot has been stolen, eaten by the Department of Health and replaced with a small piece of their excrement.

As juniors we used to apply for jobs locally via the traditional, tried and tested method of a CV, which was then followed by an interview if you were lucky enough.

Unfortunately this has changed and the local approach has been replaced by a centralised system that has thrown common sense and logical thinking out of the window.

MTAS is its name and it is allegedly power by a ZX Spectrum 128k, not sure if it has a tape player or a disc drive though. Juniors have been struggling the country over to fill in various boring politically correct questions over the past few weeks.

So now instead of being selected based on our education, training and experience; we are selected based on our ability to bullsh*t and lie about our abilities at functioning in the multi-disciplinary environment and our loving of smiling and being nice to everyone, no matter what.

I wonder which kind of doctor the public would rather see? A well trained experienced one or a silver tongued ass kisser with bugger all medical knowledge. Well, thanks to the government the latter will be preferred! Nice.


Anyway I think I'm speaking for quite a few juniors in saying that MTAS is an utter disgrace and that the medical profession, and the public for that matter- will both suffer from this horrific balls-up.

But then again this seems to be what the government wants; less training for doctors and a deliberate disempowering of the medical profession, so they can flog off bits of the NHS to their corporate buddies! This also seems to involve handing more responsibility to other medical staff who are not adequately trained to safely take this responsibility.

Does it strike anyone else as strange that all the government can talk about is improving patient safety, but while they harp on about this- they are destroying one of the most important things in maintaining this- good medical training. It baffles me anyway. Ho-hum.

Under the FOI act I managed to get exclusive shots of the MTAS headquarters, note not all the monkeys have access to a Spectrum:

http://home.houston.rr.com/epasveer/TypingMonkeyLarge.jpg

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