news bites

Dragging beyond compromise

The BMA and medical royal colleges agreed a solution to a row over training jobs in Britain's national health service, guaranteeing all candidates for NHS specialist traineeships will get at least one interview.

But junior doctors' leaders said the recommendations of a review group that was created to fix the government's medical training and applications system (MTAS) still had faults, and trainee anaesthetists voted overwhelmingly to reject them.

Tom Dolphin, of the BMA's Junior Doctors Committee, said that the deal was a case of “salvaging something from a disastrous system” and ensuring that “the smallest number of individuals are harmed and the smallest numbers of families broken up.” Thousands of junior doctors had feared that their career would be ruined by their failure to pass a discredited online selection procedure.

The review group said that doctors in England should be guaranteed an interview for their first choice of job. Previous solutions included all candidates being offered just one interview, but the BMA said that this would disadvantage thousands of doctors with more than one interview offer.

The agreement means that any doctor with four interview offers will still …