Pretty Damn Pleased

After much pressing of 'F5' this morning the job allocation suddenly appeared. At first glance all you could see was a code which unless you'd memorised the list meant nothing.

On checking what the code actually meant, I was pretty damn pleased with my foundation jobs. I will be moving hospitals between F1 and F2 unfortunately but the rotation is pretty perfect.

So, what am I going to be doing? Well....

F1

Renal Medicine
Vascular Surgery
Acute Medicine/Surgery

F2

A&E
Orthopaedics
Paediatrics

The F2 year suits me perfectly, I couldn't have wished for a better year. The F1 year is more generic and i'm less excited about it but its still pretty good. I'm slightly worried about starting out on renal medicine as I've never done any renal and know next to nothing about kidneys. I'm also not entirely sure what acute Med/Surg is.

So it seems that the foundation lottery has been quite generous to me. Wahey. Hope everyone else got what they were after.

Now I just have to pass. Arghhhh!

J-Day

Today is Job-Day. Or at least it's supposed to be, wouldn't surprise me if it was postponed.

I thought the results would be puiblished at midnight - they weren't and are still not there as yet.

I hope the site will cope under a barage of 'F5' presses.

Watch this space....

Computerised Fate

My future (or the next two years of it) are now in the hands of the Severn deanery computer system. I finally plucked up the courage to click submit yesterday after weeks of wrangling over the order of the 287 jobs I had to rank. In the end, I didn't have to rank all of them but I still had to rank way more than my friends in the NW (who have about 12 to 16 jobs to rank having already been allocated to hospitals). I devoted hours to this ranking process, i'm not sure why, part of me wishes there was a lucky dip option. I'm resigned to the fact I might well end up with anything, anywhere.

In 10 days (as long as there no problems) the 7000 or so final year medical students eagerly awaiting the results, of what for many, is little more than a lottery, will find out their fate for the next two years. What will it be first? Medicine, Surgery, Psychiatry, A&E, Paediatrics or something even more obscure. Who knows.

Personally i'm not all that bothered with what I end up with. Most F1 jobs are going to be fairly similar whatever you're doing. My first choice which i'm 90% sure I won't get included the unlikely subject of gynaecology. A week in wednesday will be an interesting day fo' sure.

I understand that those of you not involved in this process you'll have little idea what i'm talking about. I can tell you, its exceptionally important to the 7000 people waiting to find out the reslts of what has been a 2 or 3 month process.

Foundation School Allocations

Well the results are out, and I'm very pleased to announce that I was allocated to my first choice foundation school - (more details coming to The Real Little medic later). The results were not supposed to be out until after 8am but apparently they were out just after midnight.

I'm well pleased to have got my first choice. The second stage is to rank individual programmes (jobs basically). Although I don't yet know the details of this process, it may be that I have to go through all 240+ jobs and put them in order of the ones I'd like or it may just be a case of ranking 20 or so and hope for the best. I assume details of part 2 will surface over the next couple of days.

Hope everyone else got their first choice and good luck with picking your programmes.

UPDATE: - I have to rank all 287 jobs in preference order. That should be fun.

Location Location Location

On Wednesday this week the UKFPO will announce the results of the matching process where final year medical students will find out roughly (within a hundred miles or so) where they will undertake foundation training. I, along with 7000 other final years have been waiting patiently for the results of this lottery, so we can all buy our tickets for part 2.

I went to a meeting today at the NW deanery, mainly to be nosey, but also so that I'm able to answer any questions my colleagues might have about the process. It was an interesting morning, the people in charge were understandably in a slightly awkward position of already knowing a great deal about the results. At least they know about the NW, which doesn't help me a lot. They were very professional in not giving much away, but I suspect its fairly good news nationally, and for those who applied to the NW deanery at least. It was a little uncomfortable going round the table announcing where we had put as our first choice, I was singled out as a traitor, or at least that is how I felt, despite reassurance from the man in charge.

Why we're all bothering I'm not quite sure. Tooke is apparently going to announce tomorrow that foundation training is all wrong, blah, blah, blah. At least that is what I'm told. This is going to be quite a week for the countries junior doctors. Foundation deanery announcements, publication of the Tooke report (although I thought this had already all been published and can't find anything about tomorrow's announcement) and the start of applications for specialty training. I suspect the media will have a luke warm reaction to the weeks events, but will manage to turn the situation round to have yet another go at doctors, or more precisely GPs. The Daily Mail headline this Thursday will be something like this: "Many Junior Doctors Facing Unemployment - GPs to Blame For Not Working Enough Hours" - a preposterously illogical headline, but not beyond the realm of possibility.

As I mentioned earlier, Wednesday is only part 1. Part 2 involves being allocated to a particular hospital trust, then a particular job track. The process for this allocation is going to be different throughout the country, and as yet, I've got no idea how my first choice deanery are going to be doing things. Maybe they'll be kind enough to inform us on Wednesday as the results are announced.

Lets hope that unlike last year, our data is secure. You may or may not remember that last year, the names, addresses, sexual preference, religion and application forms of 7000 final year medical students were accessible on the foundation programme website. This was well before the government lost CDs full of data here there and everywhere. I'm told that this breech of data was malicious and that criminal proceedings are underway. I suppose that is reassuring.

Some of you will have absolutely no idea what this post is about, and its very hard to explain clearly what is going on. Lets just say its quite important (for us at least) and all that remains to be said is good luck to my colleagues who are awaiting their fate, its like Christmas, all over again, but with less wrapping paper.

Jobs Ahoy

20

20th December 2007

5 Days to go till Christmas

tlm fact: I once spent 22 hours straight playing football manager.

This announcement which appeared on the UKFPO website yesterday was a welcome relief. Apparently all UK medicine graduates are guaranteed a 2 year foundation post. This comes after reports that thousands of non-UK graduates would push the numbers of people applying well above the number of posts available. Apparently there were 7000 applicants for 7200 posts. This will hopefully quash some of the rumours floating around such as there being thousands of applicants for the NW deanery alone.

I always suspected (or perhaps it was just wishful thinking) that things wouldn't be quite as bad as some of the scare mongers had suggested, so I'm very pleased to hear this announcement. Now we all have to sit tight until the 9^th of January to find out which deanery we've been posted to. The UKFPO announcement also said that the majority of people would be placed in their first choice deanery which is also quite reassuring. I still don't know how my first choice deanery is going to allocate particular jobs. The NW are using a 2-round process, first, allocating people to trusts before the second round where people are allocated to particular tracks, this is all done using the same preference system and scores by which we are allocated to deaneries. This doesn't sound all that bad so hopefully it'll be something similar wherever I end up. There is a slim chance that interviews might be used but personally I can't see that happening. It is quite likely that I might have to sit down and rank in preference order 200 or so jobs, that would be fun (anything involving Psych being automatically rejected to the bottom.)

Of course all this is dependant on a couple of factors a) that I pass my exams, b) that my application hasn't been swallowed by the computer never to be seen again. Knowing my luck with 'random' allocation i'll end up in the Shetlands, or worse, the North West!