Our Institutions are hollowed out: Part 3

I have previously written about our¹ “institutions” being “hollowed out”.

Part 1 featured the Royal College of Nursing and The Solicitors Regulation Authority:

Our institutions are hollowed out.

Part 2 cited undeclared conflicts of interest in respect of the Royal College of General Practitioners:

Our institutions are hollowed out: part 2.

This week, I have 2 more examples.

1. The General Medical Council, the institution which regulates doctors in the UK.

The Daily Telegraph reported last week that a GMC spokesman had stated that:

If a doctor had received a historical sanction [i.e. the suspension is no longer in place] prior to transitioning, this information would not be available on their new public-facing record on the medical register,” says a GMC spokesman.

As pointed out in a later piece, this was too much even for the ultra-woke and incompetent-even-by-the-standards-of-the-last-government Labour administration, since it created the insane situation whereby:

..medics seeking to hide a chequered disciplinary history could exploit the system by choosing to change their gender identity in order to erase their past.

It also means a female patient who specifically requested a female doctor would be unable to find out if their doctor was born a man.

The Government’s Health Secretary intervened and the policy was reported as reversed a few days later:

Notwithstanding it has been reversed, the episode says a lot about how poisonous the “woke mind virus” has become. How on earth a body charged with patient safety can possibly have not seen the dangers inherent in this policy is beyond me; or, should I say, it would have been beyond me if I hadn’t witnessed all manner of ideologically-driven lunacy from governments over the past few years.

2. The Royal College of Physicians

This is one of the quasi-independent institutions which regulates “higher training” of doctors in the UK. Doctors have to pass specific exams and become a “member of the Royal College” to qualify for training schemes leading to senior positions in the UK.

This week the Royal College dropped a bombshell, announcing here that:

"Out of 1451 candidates in the MRCP(UK) Part 2 Written Examination on the 6 September 2023 (Diet 2023/3), 283 were given the wrong result - 61 candidates who were told they had failed have passed and 222 candidates who were told they had passed have failed."

Needless to say, this “hot mess” has caused significant consternation. There will be doctors on training schemes they shouldn’t be on, and others will have failed to get on them when they should have, and made unnecessary and ill-advised career switches as a result.

The Resident Doctor Committees of the three Royal Colleges of Physicians have made the following not unreasonable demands:

Whilst ostensibly this episode might not fit into the “hollowed out” of my title, I should point out that I don’t regard incompetence (which is often the result of ideology taking precedence over practical needs) as outside the bouindaries of the definition of “hollowed out”.

Nobody yet knows the genesis of this monumental error, and maybe we will never know the full picture.

I’d be surprised if an over-reliance on technology didn’t feature. Most modern-day disasters seem to stem from over-reliance on technology, removing or downgrading the human elements of processes by which these kind of errors would have been spotted previously.

What I find somewhat surprising here is the length of time it has taken this to come to light. Yes, I can accept they need to get a precise handle on the extent of the problem but these exams were 17 months ago.

I simply can’t believe that several candidates who were a “shoe-in” did not raise the alarm bells by complaining, either directly or through their surprised mentors. That suggests yet more incompetence in the College’s processes, or worse, an attempt to brush the problem under the carpet rather than come clean.

Now, where have we heard of arms of government doing that before?

1. I am in the UK so am referring principally to British institutions.