BMA Press Office
For Immediate Release
BMA Launches Sexy Doc Show
London, UK February 2010 – Britain’s leading medical association has launched a new TV series starring sexy young docs in a bid to boost trainee numbers.
Modelled on the recent BBC drama Desperate Romantics, the six part Desperate Doctors portrays junior doctor training to be a racy romp through the wards and clinics – far cry from the dull round of failed job applications and endless assessments depicted by many of today’s junior doctors.
Officials at the British Medical Association have been spurned into action by plummeting trainee numbers. The imminent arrival of medical revalidation – said by the Association to threaten the careers of as many as one in seven practicing doctors – have heightened fears that within five years there will be a severe shortage of medics available to run the NHS.
The BMA hopes that depicting junior training as a fun filled, drug-fuelled, sex-crazed orgy will re-ignite jaded doctors’ interest in a medical career.
BMA Chair Dr Sir Shandy Mascara said: “Back in my day, being a junior doctor was fun. What we are trying to show with our new doc-u-drama Desperate Doctors is that it can still be fun.”
ends
Notes to editors
1. There has been a severe reduction in recent years in the number of applicants to medical training programs in the UK. The crisis deepened last November, following the introduction of the EWTD. General Practice has been particularly badly hit, with a 33% slump in applications.
2. Medical revalidation pilots are getting underway this year, with full roll-out expected next year. Early indications are that between 5% and 14% of all GPs will fail at least one element of revalidation, with some having to do up to 18 months of ‘corrective training’.
For the first time since MTAS 2007 we have jobs going into the second round as there were insufficient appointable applications in the first round. How much longer will this dumbing down of training go on?
Those bastard educationalists who set it all up have now moved from Training to revalidation. The merger of the incompetent PMETB and the useless GMC is a marriage made in hell to inflict misery on us all.
The lunatics are taking over the asylum, and no-one is willing to stop them. Soon the damage will be irrepairable. I shall retire to Holland as there will only be dumbed down docs in UK when I am old.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure that watching too much ER was part of the reason that I ended up at medical school. Funnily enough it wasn’t quite as I had expected…
in what sense is medical school not what you expected? (question from a hopeful applicant).
You don’t get to rush around on trolleys quite as much as I’d hoped, there was no Dr Carter (although some fairly good alternatives) and very disappointingly no background music at all.
Still a lot of fun however…
Anon – Most (but by no means all) medical bloggers must appear as grumpy old men/women. We are grumpy for a reason.
The reason is that we remember the pre-Thatcherite NHS. It wasn’t perfect, but one of the many good things about it was that we – as doctors – got on with doctoring. Managers were few and far between, and the government had no practical bearing on our day to day lives.
Now all that is reversed. Far worse, the government has decided it wants to control the medical profession right down to the most minute detail. The means to do this is revalidation. You wont be able to practise medicine unless you revalidate, and the criteria for revalidation are set by the GMC, and the GMC is a government quango. This degree of control is unprecedented. In its structure and mechanisms it amounts to totalitarianism: rigid central state control, every detail of every individuals life scrutinised and recorded centrally, a secret police and a network of controllers and informers (GMC/Responsible Officers/Appraisers).
Read round the other UK medical bloggers and get a feel for what we are all saying. Dr No reckons they are not just a vocal minority; they really do reflect what is happening on the shop floor. At the very least, it will enable you to make a better informed decision about what degree you want to do.
So as predicted the revalidation/appraisal sh*t is hitting the fan. Well, I suspect medics have to embrace what they themselves have accepted graciously.
“BMA Chair Dr Sir Shandy Mascara”
Fresh from the Patients Association and the Masonic Hall. I am surprised he has anytime left.
So, I shall watch the meltdown!:)
RP