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Doctors’ leader: Training fiasco failed patients
EXCLUSIVE: Helen Puttick, Health Correspondent
16 Aug 2010
One of Scotland’s most eminent doctors has accused some senior medics of being “older chaps” out of touch with modern medicine.
In his first interview since taking office Dr Ian Anderson, the outspoken new president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow (RCPSG), said royal college leaders detached from the frontline had seriously let down patients and frontline doctors.
The colleges, he said, failed to take decisive action as a new scheme for training junior doctors known as Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) collapsed into chaos, leaving thousands of promising young medics facing an uncertain future.
He is calling for younger doctors to take on a bigger role in the Glasgow college to ensure they keep in touch.
Dr Anderson, an accident and emergency consultant who still works at Glasgow’s Victoria Infirmary, said: “I think MMC was an unmitigated disaster for British medicine and I think the colleges slipped up in not trying to fix it at the time. I was very unhappy about it and I spoke openly about it and did not get much support from the older chaps who I thought were probably removed from the heat of the coal face.”
A catalogue of problems hampered MMC when it was launched across the UK in 2007. There were thousands more applicants than medical training jobs, all faith was lost in the computer system used to shortlist candidates, and personal details from applications were accidentally released on the web.
Dr Anderson said junior doctors had still not forgiven the colleges for letting the fiasco unfold and he did not blame them.
He said: “I think we should have been off the sidelines, sleeves rolled up and getting right stuck in about it. I think the leadership was probably elderly, rather kind of reserved and gentle- manly or lady-like and did not want to get involved in the hurly burly of getting it sorted out. They should have done it as guardians of the profession, as advocates of trainees and the public.”
At the age of 59, Dr Anderson does believe “older geeks” like himself can bring experience to the royal colleges, which provide postgraduate medical education and assessment in the UK and promote high medical standards at home and around the world.
However, he wants the RCPSG to become more inclusive and hopes to see someone in their late thirties or early forties, not to mention a woman, become president one day.
While the royal colleges have argued in favour of centralising medical services in the past, Dr Anderson sat on the scrutiny panel set up by the SNP which saved Monklands Hospital A&E in Lanarkshire.
The levels of ill health in the community and the accounts of patients who wanted to keep the department clearly made an impression on him.
He dismisses doctors who still think the wrong decision was taken as wanting “a softer life,” working fewer nights on call.
He notes that newly qualified medics and specialists have a far easier life today and says he hopes they “do not whinge” if cutbacks in public-sector funding make their jobs more demanding.
But he does not want a return to the days when doctors felt “almost physically sick because they worked such long hours”.
And he is concerned university life is already too tough on medical students.
“When you see them in year one they are bubbling with enthusiasm. By the time they graduate, they look as though the need antidepressants,” he said.
Maintaining the passion of young doctors is an area where he hopes the college can make a difference under his leadership. Brokering closer relationships with the other royal colleges is also one of his aims.
Dr Gordon Lehany, chair- man of the British Medical Association’s Scottish Junior Doctors’ Committee, agreed that many junior doctors were still angry about the MMC fiasco but said: “There is a danger of spending too much time berating people about the past and the most important thing is we learn from what has gone on.”
He added that all bodies, including the BMA, should be representative of the medical profession as a whole and involve people of all ages.
