Dear Sir
As a junior doctor progressing through what seems to be a never ending postgraduate training pathway, it appears that it is not only myself who must continually prove my worth. Today's medical students are facing tougher competition than ever to secure foundation jobs.
When I applied, there was no interview but instead a ‘white space’ question form asking for evidence of prizes or publications and testing candidates, for example, on how they demonstrate evidence of teamwork, leadership or other professional remits.
The Improving Selection to the Foundation Programme (ISFP) project has now reformed the application process with plans in place to utilize a Situational Judgment Test (SJT) for candidates applying in 2013. There will also be an Educational Performance Measure (EPM) score comprised of an academic quartile ranking in addition to detailing evidence of prizes, publications, presentations, and additional degrees.
The SJT plans to utilize questions drawn from nine professional attributes – commitment to professionalism, coping with pressure, effective communication, learning and professional development, organization and planning, patient focus, problem solving and decision making, self-awareness and insight, and working effectively as part of a team.
Now in my view, it seems slightly premature to test barely qualified doctors in this way, and worse still to allow such scores to be then used to determine job security. How can governing bodies, such as the Medical Students Council (MSC), think that students would have any concept of such attributes, having never been truly exposed to the hospital environment?
I am sure many senior doctors would struggle with being tested in this way and even freshly faced consultants, who have jumped through a minimum of 10 years of training hoops. When candidates are fresh out of medical school, they have undertaken countless exams, pushed themselves to CV build while, dare I say it, trying to maintain outside interests if time allows.
Now I agree with countless medical students exiting the factory; it is no easy task to job-allocate, but whatever happened to a simple CV and interview process where soon to be doctors can truly prove their worth in physical form through structured stations as opposed to being simply a reference score?
The ISFP's board has detailed their ‘case for change’. A primary bulleted point reads
‘The marking of the answers to the ‘white space’ questions is labour intensive, the cost approaching
£2m per year in clinician time’
I rest my case