The doctors fiasco goes on

It is a long hard road between the bright-eyed medical student with a clutch of A-grade Advanced Highers and the fully-fledged hospital consultant, even when the route is relatively straightforward. Readers of The Herald will be well aware by now that as a result of the introduction of a disastrous online applications process, the route has been transformed this year into something of an obstacle course: questions that required students to reply in "psychobabble"; no CV setting out the level of experience and achievements; the treatment of the whole of Scotland as a single area, so that a student with family commitments in Glasgow could be sent to Wick. There have been suggestions that candidates could produce impressive-sounding applications by dint of some judicious cutting and pasting from the internet, while well-regarded doctors would be left jobless. The system was so lacking in coherence that there were allegations the wrong doctors could end up in the wrong posts in the wrong place. Hundreds of junior doctors signed protest petitions and joined marches, while many senior consultants also voiced their concerns.