To think the junior / resident doctors are greedy, selfish, entitled & lazy?

Yes with a DC in foundation years now (and not striking). It’s the ‘ban them from striking’ ‘they knew what they chose’ ‘who do they think they are’ ‘they’re not that clever anyway’ disdainful rhetoric I’m commenting on. The BMA with its current administration is woeful and asking for more money in this economic climate is way off the pulse. However, we will not keep our best young doctors if they are all tarred with the same brush and are vilified by the public, particularly when their jobs are so public facing. I remember what happened when public opinion turned against investment bankers after the 2007/08 crash. It was ugly. There may be enough oversupply to treat young doctors as cannon fodder but will the ones left be the best is the bigger question.

Have you been following the oversupply of resident doctors to consultant training posts?

And then they go abroad instead where they get treated much better. FFS, who knew that would happen!

When I grow up I want to be a doctor. Well you know its long hours and the pay is reasonable, but not that good. That's ok, its my calling, I want to help people. Ok, just so you know.

I am a doctor now, I am going on strike as the money and hours are rubbish. Yes but you knew that even before you applied. FFS

Their behavior is appalling - hopefully they will make it law that doctors and nurses cannot strike.

Yes and I speak from experience. The doctor who nearly cost me my life got nothing more than a mention during a generic briefing and has had no accountability. I imagine it has not even registered to him how his actions have impacted me and my family.

@Vinvertebrate In every high pressure career, people make the wrong choices. They are not the right fit and leave. Or are asked to leave as they don’t make the grade. Rarely does this happen to doctors but it’s inevitable some are in the wrong career, and that’s often the case with teachers for example.

Meant kindly, but if studying medicine landed you in a psychiatric hospital, it would be reasonable to infer that practising medicine is not the ideal career. There is no shortage of young people with excellent academics wanting to be doctors, even now it supposedly pays better in Starbucks. (Spoiler: it doesn’t).

I can relate too - the night before my first law society final, I became fixated on the idea that I had cheated. I’d been reviewing past papers and worked out the “pattern” of repeat questions, so I rang my tutor at midnight to “confess”. I often wonder if I’d have ended up in psychiatric care if his response hadn’t been “for fucks sake Vin just go to bed”.

Loads of effort is made to protect doctors’ wellbeing in the NHS now - it hasn’t always been the case, but it’s better. In corporate law, I have never worked anywhere where I was not expected to waive my WTD rights on day 1, nor have my working hours ever fallen within those parameters. I often worked 60 hours without sleep as a NQ - it’s part of training for professional life. I couldn’t do it now, nor would I want to, but I learnt a fucktonne about my practice area and it made me more experienced, knowledgeable and credible very rapidly. No antisocial hours or overtime payments either!

Sorry but the protesters really do not know they are born, and their pay demands are laughable.

@Bones101 It’s true that in all professions the job is underestimated. Some people just are not cut out for a super busy job and like a more sedate job with less pressure. You didn’t handle the stress but working hours are now much shorter and a lot of attention is given to well being. To earn a minimum of £110,000 as a consultant, you have to power on through and most people manage to do that. You will find head teachers, lawyers and finance people have exactly the same levels of workload. They don’t all stay in their professions either.

Interesting. Yeah, I haven't had a great experience with NHS doctors although it's got less awful recently, as if some key training has taken place. Or maybe just a younger, less patriarchal and condesending generation are coming through. One or two experiences that were exceptions though and I'm very grateful to those individuals. Fascinating to get an idea of how things work abroad.

I'm a consultant.

I ended up in a psychiatric hospital in med school from stress.

Leave them alone. You know idea the dress they're under.

I worked in hospitals in 2 different countries as a case manager. My job was to partner with the doctor to develop the treatment plan and liaise with outside professionals, families, Courts etc. And to ensure good follow up Care was in place in time for people when they discharged. I met with doctors daily. I was treated like a respected professional colleague who might know in more about a situation than they did. Decisions about care were made collaboratively and I was rarely patronized. Moving back to the UK, I have been talked over, mocked and generally been treated like an idiot. Several doctors have sworn up and down that they have not been given info to try to shift blame - however since
1 keep careful notes, I have always been able to defend my practice. I have also seen doctors from GP practices swear letters had not been sent usually to pretend they had not been told a patient was Suicidal when in fact they ignored letters for weeks. I loved my doctor colleagues, especially in the USA. UK doctors have been an unwelcome surprise. Apologies for random caps, am writing on a tablet.

It’s on the above 100,000 when you lose your tax free allowance

Can you tell us more about your experience with healthcare overseas and how it compares to the NHS?

I'm not sure why you think anything that I've written means that I need this explanation from you? That's all pretty self evident as far as I was concerned.

Agreed. Just different skillsets and ways of thinking. The Thog Test is a good example of this. Doctors generally can quite easily solve it, lawyers generally struggle.

@ImdunferLaw is absolutely fundamental to society. As is health. There’s no upper God here. The question of law arises because doctors seem to think they are underpaid when competed to lawyers. The majority of lawyers are not high earners and doctors can earn far more. The KCs and others in commercial law firms are a different breed and have competed with the best to get where they are. Clearly they are not all advocating in court. However those that do at the highest level will be very intelligent. However their skills are not the same as doctors. They would not want to be doctors and vice versa I expect.

There are 188,000 or so doctors in the NHS, can we possibly stop writing the entire profession off as useless? Most of them must be doing an acceptable job most of the time or the NHS wouldn't exist.

Many of them, ime, are doing their level best in a system which is past its sell-by date and calculated to prevent them performing at their best every which way they turn.

I'm not trying to claim that lawyers are more intelligent than doctors

You literally said that a poster who had said exactly that was correct!

The sooner these useless entities are replaced the better 🙂

Oh, and you'd better let Wes Streeting know that he's on a fools errand by trying to tackle the inequalities that women face when trying to access healthcare. I'm sure he's spouting 'utter nonsense' as well. Not to mention my dead friend whose GP was too thick to see that anaemia, coupled with a high white cell count might actually mean she had leukaemia. She died due to lack of diagnosis and treatment.

30 years experience in nursing and almost 60 as a human being. Yeah, sure, no valid observations whatsoever 🙄 I'm also audhd which means I can identify patterns that others can't.

Absolutely you only have to look at the news or attend a Coroners Court, to See how good doctors are at shifting the blame. I have said this before, but having worked overseas in health Care, I was shocked by the arrogance and sloppy practice of a lot of NHS doctors.

Absolutely off tbe top of your head, as you say. No evidence, utter nonsense

I'm not trying to claim that lawyers are more intelligent than doctors, what I am saying is that many doctors don't have a particular type of intelligence that's needed in order to practise medicine. I'm also not trying to claim that all doctors are lacking in the upstairs department. I have identified a pattern of behaviour that leaves them prone to being poor practitioners. There are different types of intelligence, the ability to retain and then regurgitate information is merely one type.

I’m a lawyer and I’m definitely less intelligent than my mate who is a brilliant oncology professor, and I am entirely dim compared to most of the QC’s I’ve worked with. Equally, the last time I used a solicitor for conveyancing they were vacuous and slow, and a couple of the GP’s at our nearest practice are exceptionally obtuse.

Neither profession has entrants with shabby academics at age 18, but it proves nothing, and is not an accurate reflection of their practice at age 35, or 50. The main difference is that the medics will all be paid broadly the same by the NHS whereas the lawyers will be paid according to their performance (or more accurately, the amount they bill).