The NHS

I had to mention it eventually. Here's a link from Dr Crippen's blog. Please, please read it. Then perhaps you'll understand the total, utter disaster this new training system has created:

http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/2007/06/scum-of-british-medical-profession-name.html

As several of them say, what more could they have done to make themselves employable?

I was there, some years back, on the exam treadmill. Take one example - a part 1 exam (most postgraduate medical exams have 2 parts)

£2400 on courses, £600 on the exam.
Worked full time throughout revision (minimum 48h a week, often 56 or more.)

Days I wasn't working - 14 hours of study.
Days I was working - additional 6 hours of study on 8-10 hour day.
Three evenings out in seven months.

From the age of 24, this is what it was like. I'd already come through a school where we had exams at the end of every term, and 4 hours homework a night. I got through 5 years of medical school and God knows how many exams. I did housejobs of 90-110 hours a week. I did four? five? of these postgrad exams.

The best year was the year after my housejobs. I buggered off to New Zealand, then Australia to work. It was the longest period of my life, since the age of 7, without an exam.

But I came back, and the treadmill started up.

What happened to my teens? My twenties?

The best years of my life. So they say.

And for what? A nurse with 38 days training can prescribe the same drugs as me. A nurse with 60 days training can see patients in A&E and berate me for arrogance if I say I don't think she can work at the level I can. Those coming up behind me are being employed on their ability to fill in critical incident forms, not their experience in actually caring for people. And for the first time in my career I get hauled into a consultant's office and dressed down for immediately starting to resuscitate a patient without asking permission of the anaesthetist. Who was five years my junior, standing in petrified, paralysed horror staring at a non-breathing 35 year old woman, but when he complained the next day his feelings were deemed to be of more importance than my trying to save her life.

There are so many times when I think I don't want to do this any more.

It's a tightrope walk as it is; one slip and you're up before the GMC, splashed across the tabloids. The joy was in the moments of helping, of making people feel better, occasionally even saving a life. Of easing suffering. But it isn't like that any more. GP's are just like Tescos and should be opem 24 hours. Nurses and paramedics do a better job than a doctor with two decades of experience, they tell me. Because all doctors think they're God. Because all doctors are arrogant. Only in it for the money. Greedy. Selfish.

Tell me, would you stay in a job where that was what everyone thought of you?