Pressure mounts over doctor 'chaos'

Ahead of an opposition day debate on the issue being held on Tuesday afternoon, MPs condemned the Government's handling of the chaos.

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley, Lib Dem health spokesman Norman Lamb and backbench Labour MP Dr Ian Gibson told junior doctors the Government had failed on the issue. Speaking at a Westminster rally organised by the doctors' pressure group Remedy UK, Mr Lansley said the Government has "no idea where to go from here".

A few weeks ago, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt apologised for the "terrible anxiety" caused to junior doctors over the introduction of a computerised system for selecting candidates for specialist training.

She also promised a long-term review of Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) and, in particular, the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) online process.

But Mr Lansley told doctors: "She came last month to apologise but actually, in my book, if you apologise in the way she did, it ought to be because you recognise what happened and you regret it happening. But she does not seem to regret it at all. She wants to carry on in the same way."

Mr Lamb told doctors he had worked as an employment lawyer before working in the Commons. "When I looked at what was happening, I saw it was flawed, fatally flawed," he said. "There's no doubt that the action the Government should have taken was to suspend the process as soon as it became clear what the scale of the crisis really was. There's an old proverb that if you are in a hole 'stop digging'. The Government has not learned this lesson."

The British Medical Association (BMA) warned that the NHS could lose thousands of doctors overseas due to the chaos. More than half of doctors surveyed by the BMA said they were likely to leave the UK if they did not secure a job through the training programme.

The BMA estimates that 34,250 doctors are chasing 18,500 UK posts, due to start in August. It has requested an "urgent meeting" with Ms Hewitt following the results of the survey. Remedy UK is also hoping to mount a legal challenge over the recruitment programme.

Dr Gibson told junior doctors at the rally that MPs lived in a "crazy kind of world" and do not "know what a job is". He added: "No-one can justify what's happening to you. It's no use apologising anymore. We have had apologies. The boldest thing to do in this situation is to scrap what happens and start again."