Philip Hunt, Baron Hunt of Kings Heath
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Philip Hunt, Baron Hunt of Kings Heath, OBE (born 1949) has been Minister of State at the Department of Health since January 2007. Before that he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Lords) at the DWP, and was previously a junior Minister at the Department of Heath from 1999 until his resignation in 2003 over the Invasion of Iraq.
He was educated at the City of Oxford High School and Oxford School and left Leeds University in 1970 with a BA in political studies.
Lord Hunt's NHS career began in 1972 when he joined Oxford Regional Hospital Board as a works study officer, moving to Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre as hospital administrator in 1974. He later worked for the NHS Confederation.
There has been a great deal of criticism of Lord Hunt's performace as a minister of state, particularly as a result of widespread anger in the medical profession and the NHS as a whole regarding the implementation of a new training system for doctors known as Modernising Medical Careers [1]. This is in particular attributable to a computerised national 'Medical Training and Application System' (MTAS) for appointing jobs to junior doctors in the UK. As a result of what is widely held to be a chaotic, rushed implementation, it is predicted that over 8,000 junior doctors may be unemployed by August 2007. The MTA system is currently under investigation by a Department of Health (DoH) appointed review committee which is expected to report its findings in early April 2007.
In 1997, he was created a life peer with the title Baron Hunt of Kings Heath, of Birmingham in the County of West Midlands.
