Job offers to doctors rescinded after error
Priceless value of nation’s parks
HUNDREDS OF junior doctors offered hospital positions have had their job offers rescinded after a mistake was discovered in the recruitment process.
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) said it would have to rerun the offers process, blaming human error and branding it a “dreadful situation”.
Junior medics entering their third year of specialist training now face losing the positions they had originally been offered, with many having already made plans to start the jobs in just a few months’ time. The British Medical Association (BMA) said it was “appalled” to discover the blunder, and that it had caused “extreme anxiety” for trainees.
Those affected had been offered jobs in 24 fields through ST3 Recruitment, a nationally co-ordinated system for recruiting doctors. But last week the RCP discovered some candidates had been given the wrong interview marks following an error in transferring data from one computer program to another.
In a letter to all those with offers, the RCP said: “We are deeply sorry that it has been necessary to rerun the ST3 offer process due to a mistake in this round of processing. We have taken this approach to be fair to all candidates which can only be achieved with the real scores used.”
In a joint statement, chairman of the BMA council Chaand Nagpaul and chairman of the BMA junior doctors committee Jeeves Wijesuriya said: “We have heard from trainees who have, after receiving these job offers, put down deposits on homes, arranged moves or whose families had adjusted their plans.”
The RCP said it would do its “utmost” to resolve the cases of those who had accepted offers and made “unretractable commitments” based on those offers.
THERE ARE many occasions when the National Health Service is done no favours by its management – and the blunder over the recruitment of junior doctors is yet another such example. Job offers have been rescinded, and the process started from scratch, because of errors in a computer programme which judged the skills of each candidate.
This is regrettable. Not only had successful applicants made arrangements to move to other parts of the country to begin their work as hospital registrars, but it comes at a time when the NHS is facing record demand for its expertise and doctors from overseas are being refused permission to work here due to Theresa May’s visa restrictions.
Yet hospitals, doctors and NHS staff are not helped by those individuals who take little or no any personal responsibility for their health – rates of obesity are now at an alarming level – or some short-sighted social policy decisions that might discourage people from taking regular exercise.
This is borne out by research by the Fields in Trust charity spearheaded by the Duke of Cambridge. It estimates that the UK’s parks save the NHS more than £111m a year – enough to may for 3,500 nurses – because of the health benefits enjoyed by regular users. The wider benefits of open spaces can amount to £34bn in enhanced physical and mental wellbeing.
Yet, while the charity wants 75 per cent of all residents to live within a 10-minute walk of a protected park or green space by 2022, and with bodies like the National Trust now committed to reaching out to people from urban areas, local councils – and the Government – need to see the folly of their decision-making.
Rather than allowing the maintenance of parks and playing fields, to be scaled back, or sacrificed for new developments, it’s time they viewed such open spaces as an investment in the nation’s future health.