Appeal to Royal Colleges from Prof Brown team

Prof Bown and his team have published an open letter in the BMJ appealing to the Royal Colleges to stand by junior doctors.

Here is an email Dr Rant received from Prof Brown regarding the letter:

As the fallout from the MTAS disaster began to unfold last week, my group (now christened ‘Fidelio’ after the story about one innocent victim of the arbitrary exercise of state power) wrote to all the Presidents pleading for their help in making a united stand. We recognised that no solution could now be painless, but argued that the greatest pain would come from having no solution at all. We worry that making noises about Tooke is now seen as an acceptable alternative to recognizing the more urgent elephant in the room.

Today, we have published our letter to the Presidents online in the BMJ, prefaced by an update of headline results from our current poll. These appear to confirm our worst fears, but at under 2000 responses are open to the criticism of being unrepresentative. Nevertheless, they place the onus firmly on the DoH to publish their own figures immediately.

We have been criticized privately by some ministers and College presidents for being hysterical and ‘going too far’. We are now dependent on the silent majority’s taking part in an historic debate on whether there is a crisis and how it should be resolved. Despite MTAS-fatigue, we hope very much that you can go to [link to BMJ online] to submit a comment regarding the crisis, and the role the Royal Colleges must play in resolving this. It is equally important to register whether you think that a softly-softly approach working with the DoH is more likely to succeed in resolving this year’s crisis, or prefer a more robust approach from our leaders and a recognition of the gulf between the profession’s vision of medicine based on excellence and the DoH’s vision based on minimum competencies.

Please also continue to encourage junior colleagues to complete our poll about job offers, because the next few days and weeks will see a battle of numbers over what has really happened.

Many thanks.

Morris Brown