MTAS and West Midlands deanery pulling out of the system

Picked up from howithappened.com - the formal statement:

"The ST3 Interview Panel for General Surgery in the West Midlands have unanimously come to the conclusion that the MTAS procedure for recruitment to ST3 in General Surgery, has not been implemented according to agreed guidelines.

We have therefore declined to continue with the interviews today.We have come to this conclusion after considerable debate. We feel that this is the right course of action, which has at its heart the best interests of surgical trainees, training and our patients.

A serious procedural flaw, which came to light this morning, has been the complete lack of a longlisting process prior to selecting candidates for interview. This alone is sufficient grounds for postponement or cancellation and makes the entire recruitment process open to criticism and challenge.

Our meeting at 8.00 am today was the first available reasonable opportunity for the panel members to meet, discuss the process and air their concerns and reservations. With the limited information available today on-site, the longlisting process could not be completed satisfactorily. In addition we feel that the recruitment process for ST3 in its current format is in contradiction to equal opportunities legislation and NHS best practice guidelines.

We have in addition, wider concerns about the current MTAS process as follows,

As far as we are aware, the shortlisting application form has not been validated or demonstrated to be suitable for appointments to ST3 in General surgery which in effect is a pre-consultant appointment.

The application form domains available to the shortlisters and its accompanying scoring system have not been shown to select candidates best suited to be surgeons. It fails to distinguish adequately between candidates, giving credibility to creative writing skills rather than hard evidence of competency.

The time-scale imposed nationally has ensured that the whole process has been rushed. The unrealistic deadlines and sheer number of applications caused the MTAS computer system to crash. Changes in process have been implemented in order to meet deadlines. The marking system for shortlisting has been inconsistent throughout the country with forms being marked by a varying combination of members of the medical profession and lay people. There has been a lack of cross validation between markers and different marking methods (horizontal and vertical) have been used in different deaneries. Therefore there has been no standardisation or quality control.

The staff in the West Midlands deanery have worked tirelessly without adequate resources in place to try to meet the deadlines set. This has meant working holidays and weekends repeatedly entering marks onto an unreliable MTAS Website. They have finally provided a shortlist of candidates for ST3 in General surgery on the Friday evening prior to the Monday morning interviews. In all, the deanery has received 11500 applications, well in excess of the projected 8000.

We owe it to our patients and the profession that we are able to select and appoint the best candidates to surgical training posts and felt strongly that this was impossible today.

We have agreed to return to help re-shortlist and interview once the entire process has been proved to be reliable, robust, reproducible and has been validated and agreed upon nationally.

Above all we have carefully considered the plight of the candidates outside today, waiting to be interviewed. We have stayed and spoken to all the candidates about our decision with honesty, openness and integrity. We have been at pains to assure them of our best intentions towards trainees and surgical training as a whole. We share their concerns and the concerns of the hundreds of other young doctors who haven’t been shortlisted for any job. We share their anxieties at a system, which is being described and unjust and unfair. We have been overwhelmed by their positive responses to our action and are humbled by their words of support. We have provided support for all the candidates with the offer of contact email and telephone numbers if they require any further assistance."