Junior doctors lose High Court case on MTAS

Remedy UK has lost its plea to the High Court for the online Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) to be completely scrapped.

The pressure group, created by disgruntled junior doctors, had wanted the new-web based application system to be abandoned with the recruitment process beginning again.

Last week, the Department of Health (DH), however, agreed to discontinue the web system , but carry on the recruitment process through interviews with successful candidates.

A Remedy UK spokesperson said before today’s ruling: “Junior doctors are very anxious about this. It has been one mistake after another and morale has been harmed.”

However, the judge, Mr Justice Goldring, ruled against the group and said that it would be unnecessary to invalidate the interviews already done but added that the junior doctors were justified to feel angry.

“The premature introduction of the new system has had disastrous consequences – and although the legal challenge has failed, many junior doctors have an entirely justifiable sense of grievance”, he said.

He added that individual junior doctors might still have good grounds for appeal under employment law, but Remedy UK said it was a “sad day” and they would not be appealing themselves.

Health minister responsible for the NHS workforce, Lord Hunt, commented: “We welcome this finding. In consultation with representatives of the medical community, including junior doctors, we will continue to work to establish the best possible way forward in order to match trainee doctors to posts.

“We feel strongly that the process of making job offers should go ahead in the interests of both doctors and patients. We understand the uncertainty the problems with the Medical Training and Application System have caused junior doctors and their families, and acknowledge the criticisms that the judgement contains.”

The British Medical Association, whose chairman James Johnson, resigned http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/item.cfm?ID=2704 over the MTAS affair on Monday, re-iterated that there are not enough jobs available as things currently stand and this needs to be addressed.

Dr Jo Hilborne, BMA Junior Doctors Committee chair, said: “We hope the Department of Health will not claim this as a victory when the careers of thousands of doctors remain in doubt because of government failures. The High Court is absolutely right to criticise their handling of this mess, and to point out that our concerns about it were ignored. The harsh fact facing us now is that there are not enough jobs. There are 12,000 doctors who will not get training posts through this system, and they must be our priority.

“We have demanded that the government guarantee that no doctor will be unemployed as a result of this process and called for funding for extra training posts. We now hope that doctors will unite to fight for these aims. The past week has been incredibly painful for the medical profession. It’s time for us to start healing the wounds and move on.”

Health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, faces a vote of no-confidence in the Commons later this afternoon, over the MTAS controversy, which has been ongoing since the March closing date.

However, Lord Hunt says that it is important now to learn lessons from the problems the DH has experienced.

“We need to ensure that lessons from what has happened are learned and learned thoroughly. That is why the secretary of state has asked Sir John Tooke to establish an independent review of the process so that the best possible mechanisms are in place for the training of our junior doctors.”

Over 30,000 applicants are chasing around 20,000 specialist training posts and there are fears that junior doctors will go abroad if they fail to get a position here.