Promotion to hospital consultant: regression analysis using NHS administrative data

There are several curious features about this paper from Melbourne
about promotion in the Scottish NHS.

It is not clear whether the authors understand the difference between
'promotion' - which they seem to think of here as in the armed services -
moving up from Captain to Major, and appointment to a consultant post - as
in applying in response to an advertisement for an appointment and
obtaining it in open competition.

Nor was it clear whether the authors understood that trainees are
normally only eligible for appointment to a consultant post in their last
year of a long training period. No figures for the changing proportions
are given for different years in training.

They also fall into the same trap as the paper they quote on
distinction awards from Sir Netar Mallick and Elizabeth Vallance - they
assume that all applicant groups in the eligible pool have the same
proportions as the general population. They did not, for example, check to
see whether the same percentage of females as males in training applied
for consultant posts.

Some specialties are naturally more attractive to different groups;
orthopaedic surgery for example seems to attract fewer applicants for
training posts who are female than anaesthesia. Do the authors propose
some sort of allocation such that all groups are equally represented?

The whole paper would have been much more convincing if it had been
based upon the demographics of candidates applying for consultant posts,
rather than the data about the whole training labour force which the
authors appear to have used.

Competing interests:
None declared