Leading doctors have called for the abandonment of a new system for selecting candidates for higher training and asked consultants to boycott the process. In a letter to The Times, 23 of the top specialists in the country say the system is in chaos and that it is folly for senior doctors to continue struggling to keep it afloat.

They say that the review launched by the Department of Health into the Medical Training and Application Service (MTAS) in an attempt to rescue it is legally questionable and has made things worse by restricting young doctors to just a single interview.

“This is the week for grass-roots democracy to act,” say the 23, led by Morris Brown, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Cambridge.

“MTAS cannot progress without participation by individual consultants in interviews.

“We hope they will say no, that individual trusts will ballot their consultants, and that medical directors and chief executives, putting patient care first, will say no.”

MTAS has been in meltdown for the past month as a result of failures in the computer-based system for selecting junior doctors for higher training. Last Friday the architect of the new training system, Professor Alan Crockard, resigned, blaming others for the failures.

Doctors complain that the computer system that produces shortlists for posts has failed to reflect the candidates’ ability or, in some cases, to produce shortlists at all. Candidates of high academic attainment and proven record have not been offered a single interview.

The appointments are critically important to young doctors, mostly in their mid-twenties and with six to eight years of medical training. They are competing for training posts that will lead on to qualification for consultant posts.

Today’s letter to The Times urges an immediate return to the old regionally based appointments system, led by the same expert doctors who will be responsible for the specialist training.

“This solution is still feasible,” it says. “It will minimise the adverse impact of the hugely expensive and ill-consid-ered reorganisation on patient care, while providing much-needed breathing space for careful planning and validation of new training and appointment processes.”

Among the signatories of the letter are the professors of medicine at Liverpool and Man-chester universities (George Hart and Tony Heagerty), the Vice-Dean at the Royal Free and University Hospital in London, (Humphrey Hodgson), Professor Stephen O’Rahilly FRS from Cambridge, and Nick Wright, Warden of Queen Mary College in London.

Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, was forced to apologise yesterday to doctors affected by the failure of MTAS. She conceded that implementa-tion was “nowhere near what it should have been”. She told Radio 4’s Today programme: “That is exactly why junior doctors have been caused this absolutely needless anxiety and distress and I am very sorry indeed that that has happened. We are now sorting it out.” But Ms Hewitt insisted that the new training scheme, called Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), was sound.

However, the signatories of the letter say that MMC imposes premature choices and expects doctors to hand over five years of their lives “without being told the detailed specification or location of the training or mentorship they will receive”. Ms Hewitt admitted only that the shortlisting process did not work.

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