Naked Truth Blog » Clinical Medicine

UKFPO error 2010

Dom — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:38:32 +0000

North-East Thames is a competitive Foundation School and a system error may have directly affected the applications of 34 students. Six of these students may be in an entirely different foundation school due to their not receiving sufficient points. It is possible that this may have a knock-on effect for other students who may be displaced from their first choice of North-East Thames to a different Foundation School. UKFPO have been impressively quick in recognising and responding to the problem.

SENT ON BEHALF OF PROFESSOR DEREK GALLEN

This email has been sent to: Postgraduate Deans, Foundation School Directors, Foundation School Managers, Rules Group Members, Heads of Medical Schools, Medical Schools Council, UKFPO, Medical Students Board, and BMA Medical Students Committee

For information please find below the statement sent to the BMA news regarding the recent quartile score administrative error which affected a small number of students from Barts and the London Medical School.

North East Thames Foundation School Apologises for

Foundation Programme 2010 Recruitment Administrative Error

Applicants to the Foundation Programme 2010 were able to log into their online accounts on Friday, 19 February to see a breakdown of their application scores. A small proportion of students from Barts and the London Medical School were surprised to find that the academic quartile scores provided to them by Barts were different from those they saw on the online application system.

Investigations at the weekend and on Monday revealed that there were process and administration issues at both Barts and the London Medical School and North East Thames Foundation School (NETFS).

Before potential applicants to the Foundation Programme can enrol online, medical schools must provide details of eligible students to their local foundation school by a set deadline in order for them to be pre-loaded onto the system. This year, Barts and the London were unable to provide their quartile rankings by the deadline because some results for students re-sitting exams were only available after this deadline. In order to ensure that their students could enrol at the same time as all other students, all Barts students were uploaded into the application system with a provisional score of 34, the lowest quartile ranking, with an agreement they would be amended when the final data came through from the medical school.

When the medical school sent through the final scores on a spreadsheet, administrative staff at the North East Thames Foundation School input the new scores, with the exception of one page of the spreadsheet which had been missed in error. The result is that 34 students whose academic quartile scores were on the missing spreadsheet page are lower than they should have been. The scores of six of these students, who didn’t get into their first choice foundation school, will be reviewed and NETFS will work with other foundation schools to place these doctors in the school they should have been allocated to as vacancies arise from withdrawals and finals fails.

All of those students affected have been contacted by NETFS and informed of the steps being taken to ensure they receive the help and support they need.

Professor Derek Gallen, National Director of the UK Foundation Programme Office, who runs the national Foundation Programme recruitment process on behalf of the four UK health departments said,

“As soon as our student advisors contacted us on Saturday, we began looking into score discrepancies as a matter of urgency with the online hosts, NETFS and Barts and the London. The UKFPO has asked that all foundation schools cooperate with NETFS to help those affected by this error. Of the 28 students that got into their first choice school, but with a lower programme allocation than they may have otherwise received; the UKFPO has asked that foundation schools give these students preferential allocations for their F2 year.”

Dr Michael Glynn, Foundation School Director for NETFS, said:

“We apologise unreservedly for this error. This has not been an error made by the UKFPO, or by the online application system. It was human error, plain and simple, between the medical school and local foundation school. This does not excuse it, certainly, and NEFTS will do everything it can to help those students affected. We are also working with Barts and the London to ensure this does not happen again.

Regards,

Professor Derek Gallen

National Director

UK Foundation Programme Office

Have your say

Dom — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:09:19 +0000

Commentary on the Internet is notoriously stupid. Pick pretty much any Youtube video and you will see questions being asked about the content which is clearly answered in the description on the right-hand side, or at best a simple Google away. And then asked again. And then asked again. Or you may encounter trolling in its most basic form, where people sitting in front of computer screens freed from their built-in social constraints of politeness and fear of reprisals unleash pure vitriol in the form of typing before they’ve had any time to think. People’s genuine opinions approach sheer ridiculousness in these situations. Indeed, Poe’s Law of the Internet states that “Without a winking smily or other blatant display of humour it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing. “Speak you’re branes” is a good example of a blog (there are others) which is dedicated to offering up the prime cuts of un-thought-through commentary from the dregs of the Internet.

PHD comics have produced a comic imagining if academic process was as free and open as this. What if half of the comments included “LOL” or “ROFL” in them or had far too many exclamation marks? What if people merely commented to try to direct traffic to their own website (or academic work)? What if all the rest of the comments were by semi-literate conspiracy theorists or spammers? Interestingly, this is partially the way scientific peer review is headed. In some journals, peer review is already done entirely online. The Lancet, for example, uses one page with simple instructions for the submission of all papers including correspondence. Peer review is then done by experts in the field who will not be told whom they are reviewing, although in some cases they may have a very good idea. Funny as it may seem, but that’s exactly the way peer review appears to be heading. Scientific peer review will continue to be necessary for respectability. Many different publishers of academic journals are encouraging you to bookmark their articles.

Back in the bad old days of web 1.0, if you liked a website you would add it to your bookmarks or favourites so you could return to it later. There would be no way of knowing if it had been updated other than to return to it, and if your hard drive broke then you would lose all your links. Online bookmarking is the web 2.0 equivalent of this. Links are saved to Automating posting of an article to these services has taken off in all kinds of websites and blogs. Even Google Reader is now trying to integrate a degree of sociability into its automated looking through lots and lots websites by enabling users to “like” posts to allow other users to see what’s popular, and for people to be able to make a statement about what they like and have people “follow” them. As persistent use of the Internet is now deemed normal and socially acceptable

CiteULike, Complore, Connotea specialise in bookmarking and working together on journals and other resources related to academia, but other services which are used by mere mortals are often linked to, including Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Technorati, Facebook and Twitter. Yes, Twitter. I never thought I’d see the day when reputable journals would be encouraging you to share papers at the click of a button on Twitter. Shame it’s blocked in so many NHS trusts. I don’t think there’s going to be much success in a strategy of pointing out the education value of Twitter to Trust administrators for the time being. Maybe in a few years. In a few years, everyone will probably have a Blackberry, iPhone or equivalent so what the Trust decide to block will be moot.

Eating and Tweeting

Dom — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:09:09 +0000

Billed as the ‘easiest food diary’ you’ll ever keep, Tweet What You Eat aims to make it simple^. It is notoriously difficult for patients to remember to take their tablets. Having been a participant in a clinical trial before I realise this. It must be even harder if you have to keep track of what you eat without a dedicated nurse there to do it for you. Sunshine is the best disinfectant and openness is essential for transparency. From a trial diary of what you have been doing, it is not possible to see if entries have been made days after when patients may have ‘forgotten’ or indeed genuinely forgotten what they have eaten. It is not possible to edit what has already been posted on Twitter unless you are some kind of super hacker. Once information is there, it is there, and in the public domain. Although looking at what people are eating at the moment, I don’t feel that encouraged…

Hubmedicated

Dom — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:08:54 +0000

I never really appreciated the full use of the many of the add-on tools that can be used in conjunction with PubMed. PubMed remains more reliable than Google Scholar and all other pretenders to its throne as the best place to look for papers i.e. it’s the gold standard for finding medical research and hence for making evidence-based decisions. However, although it contains all that the most brilliant academics and the most cutting-edge consultants in the world know, it has not always been easy to find this information. It comes equipped with online training, which I do find myself coming back to now and again. Ben Goldacre has published a very quick guide to using Hubmed, which I did not really understand before. It is reasonably simple to use PubMed by itself to create RSS feeds from customised searches, but it seems to make a lot more sense with HubMed. If nothing else, it is a less forbidding front-end to the sum of human knowledge.

Plain JANE

Dom — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:08:40 +0000

JANE stands for Journal/Author Name Estimator. It is one of a series of novel tools coming online to help researchers get their work published. Its primary use is to find which journals are most likely to publish work, so is aimed at a researcher holding a completed manuscript, or nearly completed manuscript and aiming to have it published in a journal. The primary use is typing in keywords, then a list of appropriate journals will be listed alongside. There are additional options which can be completed. The Biosemantics Group is the result of a collaboration between two Dutch universities: Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University Medical Center. Work besides JANE done by the group includes the EU-ADR project to create a Europe-wide system to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and INFOBIOMED to look at synergy between bioinformatics and medical informatics at a European level. Medical informatics describes use of information technology in medicine, and bioinformatics describes use of information technology in molecular biology, so really this is related to the use of IT in Medicine, which is only going to increase in coming years.

Tamiflu tunes

Dom — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:58:13 +0000

Until now songs about swine flu had focused on the effects of the illness itself. The balance has now been redressed by a song talking about the side-effects of the treatment. This is not a vaccine. One paper in the Lancet is titled “Possible harms of oseltamivir – a call for urgent action”. Due to unexpectedly good containment of swine flu, various government subsequently downgraded their orders of oseltamivir and the developed swine flu vaccine. It seems that six people must be treated for one of these people to reduce their change of becoming infected with swine flu, but more than of these people will have side effects. The swine flu vaccine was quite quickly developed, and can safely be given at the same time as the seasonal flu vaccine. Although it does seem to have produced more side-effects, which reports of some flul-like symptoms and pain in the arm.

NPSA Medical Student Prize

Dom — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:24:54 +0000

The National Patient Safety Agency is running an essay competition for medical students. This is the first time that such an essay prize has been run in the UK. The essay title is as follows:

‘The world of patient safety through the eyes of a medical student.’
a. Three prizes will be awarded at the annual Patient Safety Congress.
b. The winner will receive £500 and the two runners-up £200 each.

The closing date for submission is 15th December 2009.

Please send all entries by email to:

Mrs Barbara Wilde,
PA to Dr. Kevin Cleary,
Medical Director, NPSA.
Telephone: 020 7927 9500
E-mail: barbara.wilde@npsa.nhs.uk

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact Dr Vivian Tang, Clinical Adviser to the Medical Director on vivian.tang@npsa.nhs.uk

Swine flu skank

Dom — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:27:23 +0000

Don’t come round with your flu symptoms

I don’t wanna die, dude.

A firm riposte to those who lament the death of socially conscious contemporary music, Jstar & Pilot have released the ‘Swine flu skank‘. Musically, along the same UK funky lines as K.I.G.’s top 10 hit ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes‘ the swine flu skank comes with its own dance demonstrating how one might “catch it, bin it, kill it”. This refrain is borrowed from the successful NHS poster campaign. Its message is clear, although whether viruses are alive in the first place to be killed is a matter for some debate. They probably aren’t, and being caught in a tissue will not disrupt its microscopic structure in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, it’s always nice to have popular music promoting healthy behaviour.

Spitting a few bars relating to the pandemic, Dr Clarke is genuinely medically qualified, unlike such wannabes as Dr Dre and Dr Octagon. Disappointingly, he is not the chap running the revision courses. On his H1N1 rap he gives useful basic advise such as advising washing hands. H1N1 freestyle is more dedicated to the epidemiology. As he highlights on his tracks, his main lyrical theses are from official advise from the flu site set up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Log on to www.flu.gov, and together we can stop the H1N1.

Elective grants from the British Medical and Dental Students Trust

Dom — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:27:01 +0000

Elective scholarships are available through the British Medical and Dental Students Trust (BMDST), a charitable organisation. MDDUS members can apply for awards of £100 and £1000. The MDDUS is an independent organisation offering legal advice and professional indemnity for doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals. The deadline for applications is 31st January for electives taking place between April and September. Grants were in the past granted in March and September, but are now simply granted in March of every year. Figures for the variation in applications and grants given can be found in this table. The overall success rate is around 20%. The BMDST is working on its own website, but for now a page is hosted by the MDDUS. It is largely funded by the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. This resource is underused at present, and is a great opportunity to find funding to make the most of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

UKFPO questions 2010

Dom — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:04:41 +0000

The UKFPO questions for 2010 application have been released. The deadline for filling them in online is next Friday 23rd. Get on it, final years. I still can’t believe they changed the West Midlands Foundation Schools at the last minute without any consultation. The following questions are scored at 10 points each and have a 200 word limit. They are numbered 2-6 as question 1 is simply filling in previous academic qualifications.

Question 2

Describe a case from your clinical experience that you have observed in the first 24 hours from hospital admission. How did members of different professional teams interact and how did this contribute to effective patient care? What did you learn from this that will influence your future practice as a new doctor?

Question 3

Describe a memorable experience of being taught and how this has shaped your thinking about teaching. Identify a particular situation in which you might be teaching as a doctor in the future. Describe how you might apply what you have learned to maximise the effectiveness of your teaching.

Question 4

You are one of two foundation doctors on a ward round. The registrar identifies a minor error made by your colleague and makes inappropriate critical comments in front of the patient and the healthcare team. Your colleague is visibly distressed. What actions would you take and how would you prioritise these? What actions do you believe your colleague should take in relation to these comments? How might you address a minor error made by a more junior colleague in the future?

Question 5

Describe one example from your medical training when you received feedback on an aspect of your performance. Explain how that feedback altered your subsequent practice. How will you use this experience to develop a specific aspect of your foundation training?

Question 6

At times, the patient and the medical team have different ideas on the management of the patient’s illness, because of personal, social or cultural views held by the patient. Describe a clinical case where you have observed this. Identify the factors that contributed to these differing views. Why is it important to understand these differences in your practice as a foundation doctor?