Intern places

chanste

There have been a few horror stories around about the lack of intern places for graduates this year. Anybody got any official links to info on this or any reassuring words?

Kwekubo

A email from the HSE's Medical Educational and Training Department at the endo of April last year read:

The HSE has confirmed that an unprecedented number of applicants for internship have withdrawn from the recruitment process for intern posts commencing July 2012. The existing number of intern posts is sufficient to cater for the EU applicants remaining in the process and some non-EU applicants.

There will be another jump in the number of Irish graduates this year compared to last year. The number of new intern places will not be increasing at the same rate.

LemonWorld

Just out of interest, does anybody know whether it will be the non-EEA applicants or those EEA students with the lower centiles who will be less likely to get the posts?

Abby19

LemonWorld wrote: »

Just out of interest, does anybody know whether it will be the non-EEA applicants or those EEA students with the lower centiles who will be less likely to get the posts?

EEA get first dibs - once they are all sorted (if there are sufficient posts) then any remaining posts are made available to the non-EEA applicants.

I saw a document posted recently on it, but can't seem to remember where.

chanste

I just received this from IMO which is the first concrete piece of information I've heard on the topic.

This coming July 2013 there will be a significant shortage of intern places relative to graduates. With regard to students who require work permits to work in Ireland it appears, as it stands, that there will be no intern places available for such students. This issue has been flagged in a number of reports over the years, most recently in the second interim implementation report from April 2012. Please click here.

Last year there were 570 intern places available. The IMO calculates currently that there are 681 eligible students who do not require work permits to work in Ireland who have applied for an intern position. This breaks down as:

1.) 615 EEA nationals from Irish Medical Schools

2.) 28 Non EEA students from Irish Medical Schools who do not require work permits

3.) 33 EEA students from non- Irish Medical Schools

4.) 5 Non EEA students who do not require work permits from non-Irish Medical Schools

All the above applicants will rank equally in terms of eligibility. Therefore allocation to intern places will be on the basis of your percentile ranking unless there is a dramatic increase in the number of places.

Since 2008, the IMO and others have been raising the serious concerns regarding the number of available intern posts which has not kept pace with the vast increase in medical students. We have written to the current Minister on a number of occasions (Letter 1, Letter 2, Letter 3, Letter 4) and indeed the issue was raised with the previous Government. The Fottrell Report, which led to the Government decision to increase medical student places, also recommended a corresponding increase in intern posts. This has not happened with the result that we now have an excess of medical graduates to intern places.

We are asking all medical students to please fill out the attached template letter and send it to their local TD (Template Letter) either by post or by email. It is essential that we lobby the Government through all available avenues and heighten awareness of this issue in order to push it up the priority list of the Department of Health and HSE.

The IMO executive will continue to push the Minister for a response and a meeting on this issue. The fault for this looming crisis rests squarely at the door of the HSE and the Minister who have been aware of this issue for some time but have chosen, contrary to all available reports, recommendations and correspondence to do nothing about this to date. It is up to each individual affected to help highlight this issue and bring pressure to bear on the Minister, the HSE and Medical Council to fund, approve and allocate additional intern places as a matter of urgency. We would ask that you forward this email to your friends and classmates who are not IMO members and ask them to help us in highlighting this issue. Indeed IMO membership is free for all students and given the current situation it would be advantageous for all involved to join the IMO in order that they can be included on mailing lists and have access to our website where this information and further information will be displayed.

Should you have any queries in relation to the foregoing, please do not hesistate to contact Carolyn O'Malley at studentissues@imo.ie

Yours sincerely,



Val Moran

Senior Industrial Relations Executive

Irish Medical Organisation

10 Fitzwilliam Place

Dublin 2



Tel: (01) 6767273

Fax: (01) 6612758

Visit our new website at www.imo.ie

Firstly, I appreciate the IMO doing something about this - I've been pretty bitchy about them before so fair play to them.

Secondly, while I fully intend to take the above advice and write to my local TDs, I think I will also tweet them as this seemed fairly effective in recent times. #570isntenough

Abby19

Here is a copy of the intern report.

chanste

The IMO have followed up with this which is of some relief:

Further to our recent email with regard to Intern places we have just received communication today from the HSE Medical Education and Training Unit that up to eighty additional intern places are being sought for July 2013. There is still a disparity of around thirty places between the number of category 1 eligibility applicants (those who do not require a work permit to work in Ireland) and the number of intern places even if the full additional 80 places are provided.

The Intern Eligibility Test will be next Friday and approximately 90 of the 681 category 1 applicants will have to sit this test. Following the results of same there may be a more even match up of applicants to places.

This still means there will be no places for any non EU students of Irish Medical Schools who require a work permit to work in Ireland. Furthermore the HSE will not be doing a presentation to final year medical students as they have done in the previous years. It is the IMO’s view that it is patently unfair that many non EU students were not clearly informed that they will not be able to obtain an intern position in Ireland particularly given that the application date has passed for applying for an intern position in other jurisdictions.

The IMO are continuing to seek a meeting with the Minister to discuss this issue and to help formulate an acceptable long term solution.

We will be updating all students as this matter progresses and we are currently seeking written confirmation from HSE MET as to the position.

I wonder if the minister is planning something like 80% pay for interns as has been the policy of making incoming HSE employees take all the cuts.

barraneary

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the Intern Eligibility Test?

chanste

barraneary wrote: »

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the Intern Eligibility Test?

Not sure of the details but I think it is something that other EU applicants have to sit before they are counted among the EU applicants from Irish schools

j.mcdrmd

The HSE recruitment process for interns in 2012 descended into farce as did the Pakistan/Indian recruitment process.

Here is a link to the thread. The 1st few posts are about the confusion over the dates that job offers would be out. Then, at post 26, it just becomes a joke.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056659454

I find myself asking :-

"Who does the HSE care less about, the patients or the doctors?"

Abby19

chanste wrote: »

The IMO have followed up with this which is of some relief:



I wonder if the minister is planning something like 80% pay for interns as has been the policy of making incoming HSE employees take all the cuts.

They already did. Intern pay is now €30k. In 2009 when I entered Med School it was pushing €36k. Unfortunately that pay cut seemed to have been slipped in with no protest.

Kwekubo

Technically the most recent move wasn't a cut in pay, it was just a termination of the living-out allowance (although it amounts to the same thing).

Abby19

Abby19 wrote: »

They already did. Intern pay is now €30k. In 2009 when I entered Med School it was pushing €36k. Unfortunately that pay cut seemed to have been slipped in with no protest.

Kwekubo wrote: »

Technically the most recent move wasn't a cut in pay, it was just a termination of the living-out allowance (although it amounts to the same thing).

I am not sure about the living out allowance, I think allowances were separate. But the pay for an intern on 1/10/2010 was €33,619 (sorry I had slightly higher figure in head, may have been but can't find it anywhere). From January 1st, 2011 it dropped to €30,257.

I attached the two docs I got the figures from - I downloaded from www.hse.ie. Just google HSE payscales.

chanste

So now that the intern Stage 2 list has been sent out I just wanted to see if anyone has any special advice for choosing.

1) I've never felt so indecisive about anything before. I have very little idea what I want to end up in, and what little idea I do have (was kinda thinking something with broad field like GIM, GP, or Emergency) will undoubtedly change when I wake up tomorrow to something different. How important is it to have, for instance, GP training in intern year if that's what someone wants to do?

2) I really want to go back to Dublin, which presents 2 problems as I see it the first being that I have no clue what any of the teams outside of Limerick are like (are there any that people are avoiding? any more likely to pay overtime etc), and secondly is this going to be really difficult to do? I'm assuming most people studying in Dublin want to stay there and there are certainly a lot of people in Limerick that want to go there.

A Neurotic

Out of interest, is the list of intern jobs available online?

chanste

Here you go.

nerrad01

chanste wrote: »

Here you go.

chanste see the blocks of 4 rotations in each post (2 med/2 surgery), do you have to stick to the way they are listed or can you mix and match when putting down your preferences?

chanste

Most of them are already listed in different orders 4 times, but aside from that no, you have a place on the application form for the code associated with each post and that's it.

his_dudeness

chanste wrote: »

I'm assuming most people studying in Dublin want to stay there and there are certainly a lot of people in Limerick that want to go there.

You probably are right, most people want to stay in the hospitals they studied in, but this is where the national selection process can work to your advantage - doesn't matter if the Dublin grads want to stay in Dublin, they have to score higher than those who want to move to Dublin to be assured of that! So, "all" you have to do is be sure you score high enough on the centile. The medical schools have little or no pull on who goes where anymore.

As regards GP internship for GP training, most people would select that on the basis that it helps, and i'm sure it doesn't hurt as most of the GPs that take interns take trainees also. But there are a lot of people on GP training schemes who didn't do a GP internship too - all about bulking the CV with research and clinical observerships in the case of GP

nerrad01

do the centile curves ever get released as in showing whats most competitive etc??

bluewall

nerrad01 wrote: »

do the centile curves ever get released as in showing whats most competitive etc??

That's a good question. Is there any way of knowing which hospitals you have the best chance of getting into based on your centile? Hence, being more informed when making your hospital choices?

vrfcno7

bluewall wrote: »

That's a good question. Is there any way of knowing which hospitals you have the best chance of getting into based on your centile? Hence, being more informed when making your hospital choices?

Unfortunately not. We had a pleasant lady from the HSE give us a talk about intern matching at the beginning of the year in UCC, where she explained that they do not have such data as of yet (so we're picking places blindly - hopefully you don't select the most popular places in the country, but there's no way of knowing)

Abby19

vrfcno7 wrote: »

Unfortunately not. We had a pleasant lady from the HSE give us a talk about intern matching at the beginning of the year in UCC, where she explained that they do not have such data as of yet (so we're picking places blindly - hopefully you don't select the most popular places in the country, but there's no way of knowing)

We also had a talk in Dublin. Possibly from the same lady. We were told to cover your options, put down a selection of the different regions and a selection of posts. And if you have a fair idea of where you rank in your class, maybe put down some less popular spots/schemes. When asked which ones were these and was the data available she said that they haven't looked at the data like that, but to talk to current interns to get an idea.

LissaCoffey

I am also not sure about the living out allowance, I think allowances were separate.