in thinking that most gp's, doctor's generally and nurses are hardworking proffessionals who deserve some respect?

[pukkapatch]

because they certainly dont seem to getany nowadays.
obvioulsy there arethe small minority of people in the profession who give it a bad name, but most of them train bloody hard and work even harder to help people. they certainly dont do it for money. not in this country anyways. and if they dont get respect, then why bother training for it?
aibu in thinking they deserve respect?

[Kathyate6mincepies]

also someone's sister not being able to afford even a small flat.

[tissy]

surgical registrars have fairly recently had their hours cut, as working long hours is apparently detrimental to training , and if she was trying to buy a small flat in a "nice" part of a large city (which is where most surgical training schemes are based), it may be true.

And I drive a fairly tatty car- to me a car is not a status symbol, but a means of transport, and I think it's wasteful to spend £50,000 on transport! Maybe that's just me, and I'm not a "proper" Consultant!

[Kathyate6mincepies]

I don't doubt it is true Tissy - I agree with you, there could be lots of other reasons I was just sceptical of that being indicative of generally low salaries.

It sounds like you have other much worse problems - working hours and lack of holidays clearly being very very serious ones.

Re 'golf-course' type comments, one of the managers on that Gerry Robinson programme had a good one - she reckoned that the reason the surgeons didn't used to be keen to operate on Friday afternoons was because 'everyone likes to go home early on a Friday.' The clinicians said it was because of teams not being available over the weekend if something went wrong - the idea that the managers could be that unaware of real issues made us

[tissy]

I didn't watch the programme, unfortunately, as I was in a bad enough mood already .

When I started in this job, I was given the Friday operating list that no-one wanted and had to do it for 5 years till a colleague literally dropped dead, and vacated a slot on another day! It took a LOT of "encouragement" for the managers to pay me for my visits to the hospital every Saturday morning to check on my patients. They thought that the On-Call team could do that....er, no! For a start they're there to deal with emergencies, not elective work, and only get paid a very small proportion of their basic salary for on-call work. Secondly, those patients are mine, and their complications are mine, and I would really resent having to patch up another consultant's problems if their ops went wrong!

[Kathyate6mincepies]

Very wise -we were throwing things at the screen and we're not even anything to do with healthcare

(There are parallels with academia though - managers who don't know enough about the job being parachuted in and bossing people around. Needless to say our administrators sneer if we come in any later than them even though we are then likely to stay late and work Saturdays. But I don't know many academics who work as hard as an average doctor, and the level of stress is only about 1% of yours!)

[welovepumpkin]

I think if nurses are being left on a unit to work alone, all night, with no help from medical staff, and not even time to eat, that unit has serious staffing issues and the consultant on-call should have been called in by the reg or nurse in charge.

Patient safety is at stake.