Labour to make 8000 junior doctors unemployed (approx. a quarter of the junior doctor workforce)
Posted by Richard999 on Thursday, 01 March 2007 23:01:27
Dear Mr David Cameron MP
Labour to make 8000 junior doctors unemployed (Approx. a quarter of the NHS junior doctor workforce)
I would like to highlight an opportunity for you to gain several thousand extra votes if you can call the Government to task on the following issue. (If you can get the general public to take an interest through the TV News, then this is a General Election winner. At least you may be able to get Patricia Hewitt to resign. Presently the Public don't really know about this because, with the exception perhaps of Channel 4 News, the labour controlled BBC and media are not interested and there is very little publicity.
I don't know if you are aware but this Government is about to make about 8000 junior doctors unemployed! This is difficult to believe but the process has already begun with the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) going live recently. Through a computer system that has been plagued with problems, about (minimum) 8000 out of 32000 junior doctors, some with 6+ years of training (paid for by the tax-payer) are being thrown on the scrap heap and there is a real risk of not being enough employed doctors to cover hospitals in August 2007.
These doctors have given their lives to medicine and now they are being utterly betrayed by this Government. Junior doctors actually RUN hospitals in that they keep the service going. You only have to look at the comments on doctors.net.uk (where there are over a hundred thousand members) to understand the utter disaster that is about to happen. The NHS is NOT SAFE in Labour hands. There are talks of a strike/ working to rule/ refusing to sign death certificates so that mortuaries fill up.
The cost of training a medical student is 250,000 each and then another 5 years of training probably costs another 250,000 pounds. If, say, only 5000 doctors are unemployed after this process then 1,250,000,000 (1.25 billion pounds) will have been wasted (more than the current published NHS debt).
These talented people who would have been our surgeons and physicians of the future will either leave the country or quit medicine to get a job to pay the mortgage. The general public have NO IDEA that this is happening because no-one seems to care and Labour have done a fantastic job of keeping it quiet. It is a scandal on a par with the recent Home Office debacles, if not worse. The BMA does everything this Labour Government tells them even if patient care is adversely affected so they have said little. So many doctors have lost faith in the BMA that a new body to represent doctors has been started up (called Remedyuk).
I have written to my local LABOUR MP James Plaskitt twice about this utterly disgraceful waste of talent and tax payers' money. Understandably he is not interested in highlighting this problem because he a Labour Politician. He simply sent back lukewarm standard replies from Lord Warner who has presided over this disaster (which is called MMC or Modernising Medical Careers for your information).
I urge you in the strongest terms to take an interest in this problem- it is a vote winner for you and a scandal of a proportion never before encountered in the NHS. The money being wasted is important but not as important as the waste of talent, the waste of trained doctors moving abroad, the damage it will do to future healthcare and recruitment (who in their right mind will want to be a doctor paying 3000 tuition fees for 5-6 years and graduating to a system that scraps them after 6 years of training) and the detrimental effects it will surely have on patient care.
Remedy UK have organised a march on 17 March in London starting at the Royal College of Physicians and ending at the Royal College of Surgeons at Lincolns Inn Fields (THE "MARCH IN MARCH"). Would it be in your interests to perhaps do a speech about this problem to coincide with the obvious media attention it will draw? Perhaps you should ask the Government about it at PMQs because once you talk about it, the entire country will be listening and it is a definite vote winner.
I am happy to talk/correspond with anyone in the Conservative party about this.
kind regards
Mr Richard A. McMahon MBBS BSc hons MRCS
Neurosurgery SHO
MMC, unemployed, MTAS, doctors, Remedyuk, Labour, waste, NHS, public