The Government was forced to climb down yesterday and announce an immediate review of the new system for selecting junior doctors for training.

The Medical Training Application Service has united doctors young and old into a revolt so powerful that it has forced the Department of Health into retreat.

The service is supposed to handle applications for higher medical training, sifting them by a computer-based system to produce shortlists of candidates suitable for interview. About 30,000 junior doctors are competing for 22,000 training places. [Letter to the editor: All trained up, nowhere to go]

The British Medical Association and a pressure group, Remedy UK, have denounced the system as unfair. But their criticisms were brushed aside until a panel of surgeons in Birmingham walked out [Times Online, March 6, 2007] rather than interview candidates who they suspected had been unfairly selected, and the Royal Colleges made clear that it backed the critics.

The Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland joined the criticism, saying: “It is appalling that the consultants of the future have had their careers put at stake by a system that was not designed well, did not undergo adequate testing or piloting, and was not checked thoroughly before its abrupt implementation.” Expressing “profound dissatisfaction and disappointment” the association joined the calls for a review.

On Monday the Department of Health said that it would be “irresponsible” to halt the interview process at this late stage.

The review will be led by Professor Neil Douglas, vice-president of the Academy and president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and is to be completed by the end of March. The aim is to identify what parts worked and did not, recommend action to put them right and identify what future action is needed. The first meeting of the review group will be held today and any immediate remedial actions agreed by Thursday.

The system was first meant to weed out ineligible candidates, so that only eligible ones were forwarded to the deaneries responsible for selection. But many ineligible candidates were included.

Next, the system was meant to produce shortlists automatically. This also failed in some regions, meaning that shortlisting had to be done by hand, at the last minute. Those responsible were overwhelmed. They should all have reached their decisions independently. But in some regions it was not done so that they could see marks and, in principle, change them.

The academy welcomed the review. “Shortcomings in this critical element of the Department of Health programme Modernising Medical Careers [MMC] have cause dismay and much distress,” it said.

It is significant that it labels MMC a Department of Health programme, while the department says that it was developed “with the help of stakeholders including the medical royal colleges”. The battle over who is to blame has already begun.

Dr Jo Hilborne, chairman of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors’ committee, said: “Not only is this response too late, it also does not go far enough. While we welcome a review, the only fair solution now is for the interview process to be suspended until it can be clearly shown that no doctor has been disadvantaged as a result of the Government’s mistakes.” Letters

Explore Health News

• Swine flu

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth