Friday 27 February 2015

More on Shape and well done Tom Dolphin

 
Anyone who reads this blog will be aware of the Shape of Training review, irrelevant of this I would strongly advise you have a glance at this excellent piece in the BMJ exposing several critical flaws of the review.  It is worth reiterating that Shape's critical flaws include its methodology, its lack of transparency, its flimsy evidence base and its dangerous recommendations.

It is easy to criticise, but nonetheless criticism is an important thing as it provides homeostatic feedback and one can only improve if one opens one's ears to it, perhaps this is why reviews that don't listen always end up doing more harm than good.  Undoubtedly the BMA made mistakes on MMC and Tom Dolphin would be the first to admit that, the key thing is that the BMA and Tom Dolphin have realises this and learnt the lesson, those in government would do well to take note of this, it takes courage and insight to do this.

I won't hide the truth from you, I have spoken to Tom on the phone in recent months relating to the review, I must reveal this fact and not pretend that I have not got to know him better.  The point I am laboriously trying to make is that Tom has shown a lot of courage in standing up to those backing the review, he was in a tricky position and it would have been easy for him just to keep his head down and go along with things, he did not, he stood up for what he and many of us think is right for our patients.

Recent developments included a rather vague non-specific statement from the Shape Steering Group, almost as if they want all this fuss to die down so that can force things through after the election.  The BMA have responded cautiously, while trainee groups such as ASiT have called the vague non-specific rambling of the Steering Group out for what it is.  For me we now need specifics on key issues like training time, we need a concrete statement saying that hospital consultant training time will not be shortened as things stand, anything less than this is meaningless waffle.  It is simply not acceptable to continue the implementation of such a flawed review.  Please add you name to this petition and stick it up on Twitter/Facebook, over 5,000 and growing:

























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