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Fury over continuing doctor recruitment fiasco

02 May 2007

Fury over continuing doctor recruitment fiasco Student doctors were seething last week as security breaches on the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) website meant that their private and personal information was compromised.

The first security breach was exposed by Channel 4 News. The programme said it allowed access to confidential information including doctors' addresses and telephone numbers, previous convictions, sexual orientation and religion.

The company also claimed that details of medical students applying for foundation course posts were openly available to the public for hours.

Andrew Lansley, shadow health secretary, has attacked health secretary Patricia Hewitt over the breach.

Speaking in the House of Commons he said: "Once again you have had to come to make a statement to the House about the appalling shambles that has become the government's system of selecting training for junior doctors."

Ms Hewitt responded by emphasising that there was no evidence that members of the public had accessed the site.

However, she came under huge pressure to take responsibility for the current crisis.

She eventually conceded mistakes had been made, saying: "I apologise again to junior doctors or foundation programme applicants who have been caused anxiety or in some cases inconvenience as a result."

The government's Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) programme has been branded a disaster by many medical students, particularly the online part of the application process.

Many applicants have complained that the system was difficult to use and continually crashed while they were trying to complete the required fields.

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