Features
National Selection to T&O ST3 posts in England 2020 & 2021 Mark AA Crowther
Mark Crowther is a Consultant T&O Surgeon for North Bristol NHS. Since 2015 he has been a member of and now chairs the National Selection Design Group for recruitment of orthopaedic registrar surgeons. In 2017 he was appointed to the Specialty Advisory Committee and is National Selection Lead for Trauma & Orthopaedic Surgery.
As National Selection Lead on the T&O Specialty Advisory Committee (SAC), I chair the Selection Design Group (SDG) made up of consultants, Training Programme Directors, SAC members and representatives of the British Orthopaedic Trainees Association (BOTA) all experienced in many aspects of training and education with a collective desire to ensure the best potential registrars are chosen for higher surgical training.
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e convene several times a year to scrutinise the most recent process using data released by Medical and Dental Recruitment and Selection (MDRS), a body responsible to the Statutory Education Bodies (SEBs), and to improve the following year’s process. We then implement delivery of the process used to select T&O ST3s done on a national basis since 2013. During this time, we have introduced a number of changes and improvements to the interview process undertaken with between 300 and 500 applicants over several days at Elland Road football stadium in Leeds. We have removed the infamous ‘killer’ station, developed the role of simulation with actors and successfully implemented the use of iPads to allow real time scoring which has facilitated early recognition of scoring errors. I took over as Chairman at the end of the 2019 process knowing we had a fair and robust process in which trainees, programme directors and trainers had confidence, in no small part because of the hard work of my predecessors David Large and James Hunter. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the MDRS acted swiftly in declaring that there would be no face-to-face interviews for any medical specialty in 2020. We found ourselves
26 | JTO | Volume 09 | Issue 03 | September 2021 | boa.ac.uk
in a strong position compared to other specialties given our historical process; our self-assessment form was well established and we knew it correlated well with the overall final score. We made a strong case for the use of the self-assessment score further validated with portfolio review, as a sole selection tool, and also for the appointment to LAT posts given the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the 2020 process. Neither proposal was adopted however due to the desire for uniformity across all medical specialties and the uncertainty of the rapidly changing global pandemic. The decision of MDRS was to appoint to substantive training posts using unvalidated self-assessment scores. We looked closely at our previous year’s data to carefully decide the ‘appointability’ score, the maximum possible being 32. The decision was a score of 21 which carried a reassuringly low risk of appointing an ‘unappointable’ applicant. With a threshold score of 20, the risk would have increased and at 19 that risk would have increased considerably. We predicted we would have 105 appointable applicants. The 12 questions contained within the selfassessment form were also ranked to be used in a tie-break situation prioritising clinical over academic achievement.
