Communication between general practitioners and child psychiatrists.

Comment We originally planned a survey covering approximately 100 posts and all hospital specialties; unfortunately we were arrested by the fraud squad and charged with making fraudulent applications. Although not prosecuted, we were advised against continuing the work. Nevertheless, our results are important and suggest that discrimination does take place against ethnic minorities, apparently at shortlisting. English applicants were twice as likely to be selected, and this difference would probably have been greater had we carried out the full study and been able to include posts in teaching hospitals. Doctors from ethnic minorities predominate in at least two of our chosen specialties (psychiatry and geriatric medicine)-reflecting these specialties' comparative unpopularity3-and the proportion of such doctors is much greater in district general hospitals than in teaching hospitals.2 It is remarkable therefore that despite these two biases we still found a twofold difference. Mechanisms could easily be incorporated to reduce the chance of name and ethnicity determining the likelihood of being shortlisted, as well as to monitor discrimination. As a start, we suggest that all application forms for medical posts should be standardised so that information identifying ethnic origin can be removed by the personnel department-for example, on a detachable front sheet. Ethnic monitoring should also be standard personnel practice so that all districts and regions can monitor whether equal opportunity policies are actually being implemented.