Career focus: Applying for preregistration posts in Scotland

Abstract

Applying for preregistration posts in Scotland Amina Hussain reports on a new preregistration house officer allocation scheme that has just completed its first year of operation in Scotland. Traditionally, Scottish medical students were left to make their own arrangements for preregistration posts with the individual consultants they had come to know, or they were entered into regional matching schemes. Postgraduate departments often had little to do with the allocation of places and merely dispatched contracts once informed to do so by consultants. There has always been a mismatch in the supply of and demand for medical graduates within the various regions of Scotland. Traditionally, this would result in the most popular posts in a region being filled by the local medical graduates who knew the consultants, while the least popular were filled by the “overflow” of students from regions where there weren't enough posts for the local graduates. Increasingly, panic stricken students were approaching consultants earlier and earlier in their academic careers to negotiate their preferred house officer posts. Consultants felt under strain at having to conduct so many exploratory discussions and to remember preliminary “deals” made as long ago as when students were only in their third year of medical school. The problem was most acute in regions where there were not enough posts for local graduates, like the north east of Scotland. It has always been a “net exporter” of graduates, whereas the west coast has always been a “net importer.” Overall, there are enough house officer posts in Scotland to match the number of Scottish medical graduates. In some instances, however, medical graduates from other EU countries were filling remaining posts, usually in the west coast, before their Scottish counterparts even knew that the vacancies existed. This meant that some Scottish graduates, especially from the north east, …