AS A junior doctor, working at senior house officer grade, I am concerned by the health department’s disappointing response to the current crisis threatening postgraduate medical education (What’s up doc? Lack of jobs, that’s what, News Review, last week). It is clear there is a shortage of training (and non-training) grade posts at SHO level.

For many years the job application process has been a time-consuming and demoralising lottery. If the government elects to ignore the warning signs and continues to bury its head in the sand, the inevitable result will be an exodus of trained individuals to other countries.

This is certainly ironic at a time when public money is being invested in increasing the number of medical student places at British universities.

Dr Katie Smith
Glasgow

DISASTER: The problem is more widespread than the health department accepts. To have any unemployed doctors in the UK, when the NHS remains desperately short of medical staff, is a disaster and shows abysmal planning.

We need more consultants and general practitioners, but doctors cannot reach this stage without a rigorous postgraduate training programme.

To train them and then present them with little or no opportunity to become the senior doctors we are so short of is farcical, an utter waste of their talents and a deplorable misuse of taxpayers’ money.

Dr Andrew Rowland
Specialist Registrar in Paediatrics, Manchester

HIP RECORD: I was sadly not surprised to read the article French surgeon botched half his NHS work (News, last week). My experience of six hip operations in four years leads me to wonder if I should apply for an entry in The Guinness Book of Records. (The latter three operations were performed by a second surgeon who was correcting the work of the first three.) With litigation under way I now find the critical evidence of a series of five x-rays appears to be lost. This, in conjunction with what have been described as “sketchy” and “shoddy” operation notes by medical experts I consulted, is proving to be detrimental to a positive conclusion.

Apparently the worst thing I did was to try to work towards the best possible recovery. Not withstanding the arrogance, is there no recall or accountability for these people?

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