Week 1 Of the 2008 Great Application Race is Over! No one has any idea who holds the yellow jersey or even if there
really is one to win at all!

Congratulations must go to this year’s organisers – someone has spent a long time typing the exact application forms we used 2 years ago but fortunately taken away all the formatting and then locked the document to stop anyone making the applications look nice (or easier to read!)

Those that went with the online application form have engineered a wonderful 15 page effort, with an average completion time of around 2.5 hours and despite different regions using the same website, you require a different
password and log on each time.

Thanks also to the trusts for their kind sponsoring of the events. Denying access to the websites from the hospital
network has led to many innovative ways of trying to fill the forms in and cut the less IT savvy out of the game.

Well, no system is perfect, I certainly wouldn’t like to be responsible for designing one, but having all the applications at once, for regions rather than specific jobs and doing at the same time as College exams is
proving frustrating. Plus the applications have a rather worrying disclaimer with them ; “It is possible that final
post numbers may differ, and that where the numbers of posts are very small, we may eventually have no vacancies,
and will, therefore, hold no interview.)”

I guess that would be surgery then …