Still wittering....

I don't know who came up with this, but it is beautiful:

Choose MMC. Choose MTAS. Choose a region. Choose a career. Choose a f***ing big lottery, choose portfolios, on-line application forms and years of uncertainty. Choose a cut in training posts, career choice and job security.

Choose FTSTA’s no one knows anything about, middle grade rotas being run by juniors who’ve never worked in the specialty before, foundation programmes you have no control over, and hospitals you don’t want to work in. Choose being treated by ‘trained doctors’ rather than ‘doctors in-training’, even though the average consultants training hours have been cut from 40,000 to 10,000.

Choose Hospital At Night and no-one knowing the patients anymore.

Choose being an SHO lost in the middle of it all, with nothing but a sparsely updated web-site to inform yourself. Choose seniors who know nothing about the system and seem powerless to influence it. Choose an internal office with no windows in your brand new PFI hospital while the doors fall off and middle managers sit in their swanky boardrooms munching on biscuits that your taxes are paying for. Choose paying £10 a day for the privilege of parking at your work-place while you work non-compliant rotas and get bullied into lying on your EWTD monitoring forms.

Choose sitting at that PC filling-in mind-numbing, spirit-crushing objective assessment questionnaires. Choose PMETB-approved curricula and competency-based assessments no-one has properly validated. Choose your third choice career path and wondering who the f*** you are on a busy post-take ward-round morning.

Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pushing your last in a miserable Non-Consultant Career Grade post, nothing more than an embarrassment to the under-experienced, ‘fit for purpose’ FY’s you’ve trained to replace yourself.

(Don’t) choose your future. Choose MMC…

There is also the 'hamster' theory of how MTAS allocated the interviews, but it is rather long and complicated (and fantastic). Or the 'monkey' theory (two monkeys shut in an office with all the application forms, left for a few days, whichever forms they don't eat/wipe their arses with/destroy are selected for interview).

Please please please, if anyone reads my drivel, read this: come to the march in London on Saturday 17/3. It's organised by Remedy UK (details here). I have no doubt that it will make not the slightest bit of difference to anything, but at least we'll be able to do some shouting, which always makes me feel better anyway. And then we can all go down the pub afterwards.