God bless the surgeons....

Fantastic, fabulous effort by the West Midlands ST3 surgical interview panel! They cancelled their interviews on the basis that the whole MTAS application process was a steaming pile of horseshit. Well, actually,the reasoning of the panel is lengthy and well thought out, and can be read in full on Dr Crippen's blog. Basically they said, 'We want to be able to shortlist our own trainees, not just interview whoever the muppets at MTAS deem suitable for higher surgical training'.

My favourite line was 'it fails to distinguish adequately between candidates, giving credibility to creative writing skills rather than hard evidence of competency'.

Bloody brilliant. I am so pleased, inordinately so I suppose as I'm still stuck in the same position as before. I hear other regions may be following suit - we shall see. From what I hear of the interviews so far, it seems that they have been almost as shambolic as the application process - people turning up to find they didn't have an interview after all, people who went in to find that the panel had not received their application form and had no idea who they were or why they were there....

They seem to have shortlisted an unprecedented number of arseholes (see Dazed and Confused's experience). Presumably arseholes are inherently talented at bullshitting, blowing their own trumpets and using buzzwords. I can almost imagine the breaking bad news scenario of one of these brand new MTAS recruits:

'I'm sorry, but your mother is dying. I must say, I'm feeling extremely empathic towards you and your family at this difficult time. Did I mention that I teach communication skills to local convicts? This illustrates my dedication to improving my CV and showing my motivation to rise to the top over the bodies of my fellow applicants. I mean doctors. Anyway, I've ticked all the boxes so far, don't you think? I found a quiet room, left my bleep with my house officer, sorry, with my F1 monkey, and brought an agency nurse in with me to wipe up the snot and tears afterwards. Anyway, the EWTD tells me that I have only thirty seconds left before I have to finish work, so any questions you may have should be quick. Otherwise you can contact the on-call ST1 if you like. They've never done on-calls or nights before and so will probably be too busy running around with their arms in the air to speak to you, but hey ho, needs must I suppose. Oh, while you're here, could you fill out one of my 360 degree assessments? Don't bother reading it, everyone just ticks 'excellent' and nobody reads it anyway but I need to send out 500 of them to the re-validation centre in Milton Keynes before tomorrow so that they can be filed in the round file marked 'bin'. Thank you for your time.'