Prof Paice - what a leading light

News has been circulating that a junior doctor has been suspended for comments made on a private internet forum. The exact ins and outs of this story have yet to emerge and I do not wish to comment more until more facts are known.

Moving on I thought I would share some golden nuggets with you, these nuggets are some of Prof Elisabeth Paice's finest comments in recent years. She obviously has a very high profile position and a lot of power in medical circles, these quotes show you just why MMC and MTAS have been such glowing successes:

"…one might have feared a tidal wave of applications, but that has not happened.
Obviously, people are targeting the post they want…they are spreading their
applications so that across the country people are getting applications in the
thousands, though not tens of thousands. Therefore, so far so good"

So Prof Paice thought MTAS was running smoothly in 2007, she also thinks medical education should be lumped in with everything else:

"Professor Elisabeth Paice of the London Deanery argued that creating an organisation dedicated specifically to medical education would make it more difficult to integrate planning and would isolate decisions about the medical workforce from their wider context: I would hate to see medical isolationism as the outcome of this and a step backwards from the integration of service strategy and financial planning, using medical education, if you like, as an enabler for service change and reform."

Hmmmm. MMC and 2007 were 'good for patients' apparently:

"Obviously, those people turned up elsewhere and are doing extremely well. It is good for patients that good people are all over the country, but it is very sad for individual doctors who perhaps have set their heart on particular placements. One of the outcomes is that people have applied for jobs and have got them but feel very distressed at the outcome."

Prof Paice is also a big fan of PMETB's standards and thinks that these are able to magically cope with EWTD's reduced training hours:

"With the European working time directive and so many changes in the health service the way we deliver training has to change; and we have to change the way in which we assess people so be more reliable and robust. A lot of this change is being driven,
rightly, by PMETB and the standards set by it."

She also squirmed when asked as to whether COPMED and the deaneries had been speaking with one voice:

"I think we have been speaking absolutely with one voice through what has been an extremely difficult time. It is correct that the experience has been different. If one asked whether this had been smooth one would get two answers, yes and no, but that is not the same as not being together in what we are trying to achieve."

MMC and MTAS are good for patients then. I stand corrected. The raft of unaccountable bureaucracies and organisations are all speaking with one united and representative voice. With the likes of Prof Paice in charge I find it very hard to understand anyone can dare to question the noble motives of our esteemed medical leaders. We are lucky to have experienced the glowing success of recent years, we should feel privileged to have been stroked by the hand of medico political genius that has been guided us to such fresh fertile pastures. It is just terribly unlucky that we all landed in a big cow pat and not on the lovely lush green grass than our medical leaders inhabit.