Your article (New blow to junior doctors searching for jobs, September 1) is factually incorrect and misleading. It is important to make clear that recruitment to jobs in Scotland through the MTAS system and some other procedures under MMC has ended. This fact was made clear to your journalist.
There are two separate, but related, issues currently at play. The first, which was the main focus of your article, concerns the arrangements for filling remaining posts and supporting junior doctors at the end of the current temporary extension of employment announced by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing in June. As your reporter was informed, there are no plans to use previous MMC procedures to support those arrangements. Available posts will be filled through local procedures at hospital and health board level, with shortlisting and interview processes that follow procedures which have the confidence of employers and potential applicants. Health boards in Scotland fill vacancies using an application form that seeks the required information from applicants in a structured way. Applicants have always been free to supplement this by attaching a CV and, in the case of medical appointments, they almost always do so.
The second issue concerns the wider process of selection and recruitment in 2008. The Scottish Government stepped away from the use of MTAS in Scotland at an early stage of the 2007 recruitment round and it indicated that it would review selection processes for 2008. Discussions are, therefore, under way about what format the application process should take for next year.
The BMA and professional bodies in Scotland are, as always, fully involved in these discussions and we await the report of Sir John Tooke into the 2007 recruitment round. These discussions will shape arrangements for recruitment in Scotland during 2008. There is considerable support for CVs to be used more extensively in the process in 2008 and it is hard to imagine that they will not be.
Dr Harry Burns, Chief Medical Officer, St Andrew's House, Edinburgh.
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