Friday 1 March 2013

Junior Doctor application screw up

Those of you who have been following the news may know that this week there's been yet another screw up with Junior doctor job applications.  Unfortunately for me, I'm now in the cohort that has been affected.  Heres a news article that summarises it all: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/27/medical-students-job-offers-exam

But basically what happened was:
This Monday: We all found out what deanery we had been allocated for our F1 and F2 jobs.   This allocation is based on our score out of 100: 50 points come from educational scores e.g. ranking within the medical school, having publications, having extra degrees etc and 50 points come from the "SJT exam" - a multi-guess "choose the most appropriate action" ethicalish type exam (its a bit of a joke of an exam anyway and I doubt it really shows who will be the better doctor but that's another issue entirely).  Anyway on Monday I got my first choice and was over the moon!  Spent quite a significant amount of time on Monday evening starting to rank my job options.

Tuesday evening (after our medical schools were shut so we couldn't even get advice):  We receive an email from FPAS (the organisation responsible for allocating our jobs) telling us that they had detected an error in the marking of the SJT and will be remarking a subset of papers (this has since been changed to EVERYONES papers) and so will have to reallocate jobs too and we are to consider Mondays allocations as no longer correct.  There wasn't actually an apology anywhere in the first email..

We've had more emails since and basically it seems like the main issue is the scanners of the electronic sheets had failed to detected rubbed out answers properly leading to some people having "too many responses" recorded for certain questions and so gaining no marks.  However there is another issue that they have not yet told us as they have admitted our marks can go up or down...Furthermore they have admitted to detecting another error in the week prior to job allocations but are claiming that was an isolated error... What a shambles!
So now with finals mere weeks away we have the stress of waiting again and then when deaneries are reallocated those at my medical school will be forced with picking actual jobs (you have to rank 100 odd actual jobs) right amongst our finals time.  Ideal!

Hope other fifth years are bearing up under the strain ok!

Halfadoc xx

 
A Wikipedia screen grab after the screwup - see second paragraph! Click on picture to see it :)