London, May 24: The careers and lives of thousands of junior doctors in Britain — including many from India who have sold up and are now languishing in the UK without any hope for the future — may be ruined because of an unfair application system.

The junior doctors yesterday lost their high court battle over the government’s controversial system for allocating specialist training posts.

Lawyers for the junior doctors argued that the system — the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) — was “so conspicuously unfair as to amount to an abuse of power”.

The doctors say that the online method of submitting applications did not work.

The judge, Mr Justice Goldring, rejected the case against the government but expressed sympathy for the doctors.

“The fact that the claimant has failed in what was accepted to be an unprecedented application so far as the law is concerned does not mean that many junior doctors do not have an entirely justifiable sense of grievance,” the judge observed. “The premature introduction of MTAS has had disastrous consequences. It was a flawed system.”

Remedy UK, the group representing junior doctors, said in a statement: “This is a sad day for doctors and the NHS. The judge has recognised that we have challenged an inherently unfair system, but at this late stage he is powerless to act.”

It went on: “We are bitterly disappointed. His judgment accepts that the careers and lives of thousands of talented doctors in this country may be harmed. Had we won, they could have won the right to be appointed under a better system, where they could have demonstrated their true excellence.”

There would be no appeal against the judgment “as the lives of 34,000 doctors have been subject to enough uncertainty in recent months”, the statement said.

“However, our actions send a message that doctors will not stand idly by as the DoH (Department of Health) forces through poorly planned reforms to the detriment of doctors and the NHS,” it added.

More than 34,000 doctors are competing for 18,500 training posts due to be filled by August. As it is essential for doctors to be in post this summer, Remedy UK called for job offers to be limited to one year’s duration to allow time for a fairer, more efficient selection process to be put in place for the future.

In March, thousands in the medical profession protested in rallies in London and Glasgow.

The secretary of state for health, Patricia Hewitt, announced last week that the use of computer-based MTAS to assess the merits of candidates was being abandoned for the second round of job interviews. Round two will now be CV-based, with junior doctors applying to individual deaneries which oversee training at a local level.

Yesterday, Mr Justice Goldring said Hewitt’s lawyers had repeated in court “how sorry she is for the uncertainty and anxiety caused to junior doctors”.

He commented: “While I have made clear that it is impossible for me as a judge to decide what the best course to follow is in this very complicated situation, it does seem to me that she might want to bear in mind what she said on March 13 — that a large number of posts will not be filled in the first round; that only candidates in respect of whom the deaneries are absolutely satisfied will be appointed.”

The judge also pointed out that Hewitt had also said on May 15 that round two “would offer substantial opportunities”.

The British Medical Association (BMA) expressed its concern “for the thousands of doctors who will not get posts” and said it had requested an urgent meeting with the health secretary “to demand further action”.

Dr Jo Hilborne, chairman of the BMA junior doctors committee, said: “We hope the Department of Health will not claim this as a victory when the careers of thousands of doctors remain in doubt because of government failures. The harsh fact facing us now is that there are not enough jobs. There are 12,000 doctors who will not get training posts through this system, and they must be our priority.”