Читать книгу In Stitches - Nick Edwards, Dr. Nick Edwards - Страница 14

I am writing this passage with an almighty hangover. What a night. We had a lot of celebrating/commiserating to do. Three of my close colleagues are quitting work as A&E doctors. One is retraining to be a GP, another is moving to Australia and my third colleague is retraining to be a management consultant – she doesn’t want to give up medicine, but she has kids at school and a mortgage to pay and is worried that she is going to be unemployed in August, because of the uncertainty of the new recruiting system. All are fed up with the lifestyle and the way they are treated.

However, it is not just A&E where hospital doctors are feeling fed up and angry. Hospital doctors, both junior and senior, throughout the country are becoming more and more disillusioned and are leaving in droves. These decisions have been entirely justifiable for the individuals concerned, but for the country as a whole it has been an enormous waste of talent and money. This is happening at a time when more and more money is being pumped into the NHS. How can this be? There are a number of reasons, but ultimately it is because hospital doctors are feeling undervalued and are being blamed for the NHS’s ills; they are fed up with poor working conditions, ungrateful management and feeling unable to direct the reforms occurring in the NHS. Tragically, there has been a new way of recruiting junior doctors, which is impeding some of our best-qualified and most experienced junior doctors from getting jobs and thus forcing them to leave the NHS. The problems for hospital doctors are exacerbated when they see that even when they do qualify there are apparently going to be too many consultants and not enough jobs to go round. Will they finish all their post-graduate training to end up working only as subconsultants?

Junior doctors are feeling especially angry. It is true that there is no longer the ridiculous culture of 48-hour shifts. However, there are still unpleasant lifestyles associated with working as a doctor. Once qualified, there are the chores of having to rotate round various hospitals every six months, the stress of post-graduate exams and the worries of having to apply very frequently for new jobs. They say one of the most stressful events in life is moving and/or starting new jobs (along with getting married and having children). Junior doctors do this every six months – not the kids and marriage bits. The government has tried to rectify this by implementing changes to doctors’ training but has only managed to demoralise a whole cohort of doctors in training (see next rant).

Hospital juniors are also getting annoyed because of the way they feel they are being treated compared with their GP colleagues. The GP trainees have much more training built into their rota, they get more supervision and are not just thrown into the deep end when they start jobs, as is sometimes the case with hospital jobs. Then there is the question of pay. I do not begrudge GPs their money – that much (the average GP does not earn as much as the press says), but when I am doing an A&E shift and a GP is doing a locum out-of-hours shift round the corner he is often getting more than treble my pay. When you know that, you feel undervalued and underappreciated. However, by comparison, I have absolutely nothing to complain about compared with the nurses, receptionists, cleaners, etc.

Consultants are also becoming more fed up and some are reducing their commitment to the NHS as a result. There are numerous reasons for this but they include disillusionment about the NHS reforms, loss of continuity of junior staff and having to work to artificial targets as opposed to clinical need.

The NHS is its staff. We need a hospital staff with high morale instead of this disillusionment we are all experiencing. It is not about money – it is about having job security, feeling valued and having our time and skills used appropriately … The only good news is that with more people leaving I am getting to go to more and more after-work drinking sessions. My wife can’t really ban me if they are for long-standing colleagues’ leaving dos …