BMA demands that RCGP compensates trainees who could not complete exam

The BMA has asked the RCGP for financial compensation for GP trainees who had difficulties completing a new component of the MRCGP exam due to a ‘temporary IT outage’.

The union’s registrars committee wrote to the college after a number of candidates were unable to complete the Simulated Consultation Assessment (SCA) after an issue with the IT system that the RCGP said was due to ‘an unprecedented outage by a global third-party component’.

The BMA said that the RCGP ‘must recognise that any ostensibly small disruptions’ will have had ‘a huge impact’ on candidate performance and morale.

In the letter, GP registrars committee chair Dr Malinga Ratwatte and deputy chair Dr Elliott Philips demanded ‘financial compensation for registrars forced to resit’ the examination if they were unable to complete it due to the technical issue.

They said: ‘This would represent an acknowledgment of the impact that this disruption has had on their lives, including extra hours of work, extra hours of stress and extra hours of childcare to facilitate yet more revision.’

The letter added: ‘2023 is already a difficult time to be training in general practice. The pressure on us to deliver more and more care in the face of rising demand but stagnant investment is undeniably taxing.

‘Burnout is high, and retention is low. The RCGP’s General Election manifesto supports action to retain GP workforce, but episodes such as these, where GP registrars’ expectations that they will be examined fairly are not met, undermines their goodwill and sense of value within the NHS.’  

The new Simulated Consultation Assessment (SCA) has been rolled out for the first time last month, having replaced the Recorded Consultation Assessment (RCA), and sees GP trainees being assessed virtually in their own practice, with actors playing the role of patients.

When the outage happened, the RCGP said it had only affected a ‘small number of candidates’ and RCGP chair Professor Kamila Hawthorne said the college ‘cannot apologise enough’ and that the exams team were contacting the affected trainees to put individual arrangements in place, including offering free re-sits.

In a further explanation, the college said that on the day of the outage 83 trainees sat the SCA, adding: ‘Despite the difficulties, 46 trainees were able to complete the assessment, and 37 were unable to. Of the 46 that will now be marked we will be reviewing all cases in case any trainees were disadvantaged as a result.’

An RCGP spokesperson told Pulse: ‘We have written several times to the impacted candidates and are providing individual support and working with them to make appropriate arrangements in line with their personal situations.

‘We have a strong and longstanding commitment to a full cost recovery approach to the MRCGP examination fee and not using the examination to generate a profit to fund other activities. Therefore, any additional costs, either now or going forward, would have to be paid for from candidate fees.

‘We do not however underestimate the distress and inconvenience caused by this incident and the serious impact it has had, so we are actively looking at a range of other options to provide additional value to RCGP membership for this group of candidates.’

The SCA involves twelve simulated consultations, each lasting 12 minutes, with cases performed by ‘professional role-players who are trained, calibrated and standardised’ so that although the cases appear the same for every trainee, the exam ‘responds to the approach of each individual doctor,’ as in real life.

In the majority of cases, trainees will be able to see the simulated patient, while others will be audio only, and there will be a three-minute gap in between each case.

Earlier this year, the college faced criticism after GP trainees feared their preparation for the RCA part of their MRCGP exams was going to go to waste due to the college underestimating demand.