focus of healthcare priorities. So, how can you tell how many doctors of any specialty
that you need in any one part of the country 8-10 years from now?
Workforce planning increasingly focuses on creating doctors who have a broader base of
skills. They can then be deployed to more specific roles as the needs become clearer.
Supporting each doctor through lengthy training programmes also takes significant
investment and considerable dedication of finite resources. So, it’s important to avoid
“false starts” and “restarts”. The ideal is to match the “right” people with the “right”
programmes at the first attempt.
These points help explain why there is relatively greater availability of CT1 than ST1
posts. CT programmes can provide broad experience before dedicated specialism with
entry to ST3 or ST4 roles. Alternatively, doctors can use the CT programmes as a route
to other non-training roles.
This all means that the number of training posts available on each programme is limited,
leading to real competition between the candidates who apply.
For any job application process, regardless of profession, there are three obvious sets of
stakeholders, each with complementary objectives:
1. The organisation which wants to fill its vacancy with the very best candidate
available.
2. The applicants who each want to secure the position for themselves.
3. The interviewers or assessors who aim to establish the relative suitability of each
candidate.
When faced with multiple applicants the organisation has the challenge of finding out as
much as it possibly can about each of them. Ideally it wants to establish every
candidate’s current abilities, motivations, attitudes and potential. It then needs to collate
this information and compare each person, somehow grading their various qualities to
make the best choice. When several roles are available the organisation must rank the
candidates into a priority order for job offers.
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