It takes a brave – or exceptionally healthy – individual to incur the wrath of over half the country's 180,000 doctors. So Dominic Lawson must have a heart of oak and cojones of steel to have broken in yesterday's Sunday Times the shock revelation that the real cause of the NHS junior doctor crisis is… oestrogen.
That's right. The reason that the NHS is in crisis is the insidious creeping into medical life of ovaries, malign and deadly. No branch of medicine is safe from women and their priorities. Operations are known to have been halted - with the patient actually on the table - when the female surgeon breaks a nail. Chest compressions are being terminated mid-cardiac arrest when the junior doctor thinks her brow has started to glisten unbecomingly. And, perhaps most alarmingly of all, every Boxing Day for the last 10 years, in-hospital mortality rates have soared by 11% as female doctors desert their patients in droves, in pursuit of cheap shoes in the January sales.
Small wonder, as Mr Lawson reveals, a hidden debate is "raging" within the medical profession about this grossly irresponsible "feminisation of medicine". The underlying cause of last week's strike by junior doctors is not, it turns out, chronic NHS underfunding or inadequate workforce planning. No, it's the women like me who are firstly flooding our medical schools, then popping out babies with impunity, and finally abandoning our patients for a lazy part-timer's life.
Once upon a time, all doctors were men. That changed in 1876 when the law was changed to prohibit the exclusion of women from medical schools and universities. One hundred and forty years later, female doctors have outnumbered men for around two decades. Yet certain commentators from both within and outside the medical establishment still seem wedded to a 1950s view of the workplace in which women should jolly well know their place. They point to the one in five unfilled places in paediatrics, blaming women who work-part time for those gaps. And now they claim the fundamental reason underlying the junior doctors' position is the fact that the women amongst us are reluctant to disrupt our precious family lives by working at the weekend.
Luckily, Lawson's piece ignited Twitter in satirical outrage, and my hashtag, #likealadydoc, immediately went viral with tweets such as these:
'I know how to use gas on the HOB and on a patient in an ANAESTHETIC #likealadydoc #juniordoctors' - @WardyHannah87
'I don't run to cardiac arrests, in case I break a heel. #likealadydoc' - @sbattrawden
'Frying-pan in one hand, bone saw in the other. #likealadydoc' - @roshanaMN
Beneath the scorn, of course, is a serious point. To deliberately conflate, as Lawson appears to, the increase in numbers of female doctors with the medical profession's near-unanimous opposition to an unsafe, unfair new junior contract is as sly as it is inaccurate. I'm far from hostile to weekend working, already spending one in four weekends at the hospital. Nevertheless, I object to the pretence that we can magically provide new 'truly seven day' weekend services without a corresponding increase in the number of doctors. Making us work longer and harder to fulfill an election manifesto pledge might be an attractively cheap alternative - but it's downright dangerous for my patients.
And, to paraphrase a former Prime Minister, when it comes to my patients' safety, this #ladydoc is not, and never will be, for turning.
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Guest post: "Actually, the problem with the NHS is NOT women doctors"
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MumsnetGuestPosts · 18/01/2016 16:10
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slugseatlettuce ·
18/01/2016 18:27
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18/01/2016 20:23
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