To want to go to medical school at 37?

[MilanHilton]

I’m 37, married with two nursery aged children. Husband and I both earn £45k each so we live comfortably but not well off.

My medical care when I was pregnant was atrocious and the NHS was negligent (they admitted it). Which really got me thinking… I want to be a doctor that LISTENS to women so that what happened to me won’t happen to another lady.

I know I’m old, and coming from a non science background I’ll have to do 6 years in medical school and then extra training to be an OBGYN. Looking at the junior doctor pay bands it is going to take me years to get back to my current salary. Not to mention needing to do shift work and the stress of it all.

Financially it will be a tight decade and by the time I finish uni, the kids will be towards the end of primary so hopefully life will be easier. I’ll be mid 40s when I finish medical school so will still have another 20 years of working still.

AIBU for considering putting my young family through a decade of financial and emotional stress with the hope that I’ll earn more in the future? Is it worth the stress?

AINBU - go be a doctor! You’ll save lives (sometimes)
AIBU - that’s too much work and financial turmoil, even if you become a doctor you’re not going to address the chronic lack of resource in NHS

You have to be somewhat detached. You give too much of yourself and you're screwed. People take take and take whenever they see weakness (be that colleagues or patients).

Honestly don’t do it. It’s not worth the stress. Saying this as someone of a similar age wishing I’d taken a different career path!

I'm a nurse, I would strongly advise against it. As a junior doctor you will have zero work life balance. It is honestly not a family friendly profession. And their working conditions (hours etc) are far worse than nursing. There is a bloody good reason their currently on strike.
That aside, the vast majority of people working in the NHS went in with the best of intentions of making a difference. But due to lack of staff and underfunding it's often unachievable. Job satisfaction on a good day is amazing, but sadly those days are few and far between. That alone leads to high levels of stress and burnout. I'm a single parent, I work 2 days a week, albeit 12 hour shifts. Often by the end of my 2 working days I feel broken. I absolutely could not work full time. And will be looking to leave the NHS within the next 2-3 years.
I honestly don't want to put a downer on your dream, but I think your reasons for wanting to do it may be slightly misguided and could lead to a huge disappointment.

go for it! However you will have to pass UkCAT or BMAT first as well as get a place. Then get an offer. It’s not easy these days. I’ve seen straight A* students not get in.

@Abbimae ive got to ask why you say ‘go for it’ other than the ‘you only live once’ retort. Have you done it? Have you any experience of working in the nhs?

To the people suggesting midwifery, my friend had a career change, trained to be a midwife. Two years later she wants out. The shifts are incompatible with having a young family and the work itself is fairly depressing as so many of her patients aren't fit to own a hamster let alone raise a human.

My husband works nhs shifts and it's tough. Really tough. Don't do it.

A few months ago my 5 year old son broke down in tears because he missed his daddy so much. It was heartbreaking to see. You don't want that to be your kids trust me.

You'll be worked to exhaustion and a lot of the time not even respected. I know someone who called a doctor a wanker in A and e for having to choose a critically unwell child over her essentially ok child. It's brutal.

My husband got home not long ago and has his alarm set for 4.30am. Just stop and think about that for a minute.

It's tough on family life and also tough on a marriage, you will have much less time and energy for your husband than you do now.

It's very tough.

There are far too many comments here arguing OP should not pursue this because of the current state of the NHS. This is TEMPORARY.
Striking is unlikely to continue after the first half of this year.

😂

I wish I believed you but I absolutely don’t. When the strikes are over the nhs will still be on its knees.

@Watdidusay the NHS will continue its decline until it operates as a safety net for those with no alternative and everyone else is either part of a co-pay or private system. And the government will blame the junior drs.

I hope not but I can definitely see the NHS needs far more money than it gets same with schools and social care.

But in the Ops case I still think it's daft to try and take on such a tough course of training at the stage of life she is at.

I hope not but I can definitely see the NHS needs far more money than it gets same with schools and social care.

But in the Ops case I still think it's daft to try and take on such a tough course of training at the stage of life she is at.

Just to add another perspective. I'm sure if you were determined enough you could study medicine, plenty of people do as mature students. I'm struggling to understand why you would want to though. I'm a mature student studying physiotherapy and recently started placement on acute wards. The F1/2 junior doctors I see are basically treated as dogs bodies, running around after the consultants. They also spend most of their time holed up in a tiny claustrophobic office frantically reviewing blood test results, imaging, medications etc. Not a lot of time to be hands on with patients. They are qualified doctors though who have undergone 5 years of training. I'm sure the responsibility and fear of making a mistake is crushing, all the while also being treated like crap and earning around £15 an hour.

I thibk if we were talking about getting into law or accounting then advising to go for it is more normal.

It's fairly easy to apply for a relevant course assuming you have okay a levels or do a foundation course. It may be hard to get the training contract or graduate scheme after but it's doable if you are fairly bright. No particular academic background needed.no need to have particular degree or a levels.

But medicine is different-need precise a levels to get in and less places. Hard exams too (bmat?) Graduate medicine is very very hard to get on and many applications from allied professionals with relevant experience.

So the odds of even getting onto that course are very low.

I wouldn't, I recently left a 14 year career in healthcare. It's exhausting, thankless and overwhelming. Unless you like being dehydrated, stressed and worn out I would avoid.

You forgot “having your evidence based sensible treatment plan queried because they saw a crazy video online and think that treatments on the nhs”

No I can’t dip your leg in boiling hot tar like the olden days to cure an ulcer.

Olden days makes me twitch too, how old? Mesolithic? Tudor? 1930’s

I went to medical school in my 40s, and had a baby while studying.

I’m now a GP, and love my job. I certainly don’t regret my decision to retrain. I would be better off financially if I’d stayed in my previous career in IT, but I was bored rigid.
Training jobs in hospital were mostly hell, I did many night shifts without time to eat or pee, but it was never boring.

Junior doctors are treated appallingly badly by the hospitals that employ them. The pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, and I’m sure working conditions in hospitals have got even worse since my last hospital job, nearly ten years ago.

I did graduate entry medicine, I was one of the oldest, but there were lots of students in their 30s, many of whom either already had children, or had children while training.
Most of them are now consultants or GPs.

So it is certainly not impossible.

The question is whether the cost, financially and in time with your family, is worth it. It was worth it to me because I find human biology and medicine endlessly fascinating, and get satisfaction from finding the best solution for each patient’s problem.

I wouldn’t advise you do it if you want money, prestige, or to help people - there are much easier ways of achieving all those things.

If you have a degree, graduate entry is the cheapest and fastest route. My course took students with any degree, if you haven’t done science you would need to learn biology, chemistry and physics to approximately A level standard to pass GAMSAT.

GAMSAT is much more a test of intelligence than knowledge. If you get a very good score you can be confident you’ll cope with medical exams. If you don’t, you will find medicine very hard.

Also I was earning about £45k by my third year after graduating, including banding supplements for working out of normal hours. Though I think those payments are less generous now.

Lots of weaning babies off heroin apparently. That's from a very experienced midwife who was a friend of the family years ago. People only see the nice parts, I am sure there are some horrible bits too.

It took me 20 years from starting Med School to becoming a Consultant OBGYN. Most retire at 60.

Despite your acidic descriptions of me and your bismerching of my professionalism, what you don’t seem to realise is that we’re arguing the same point.
You’re loudly and verbosely trumpeting the exact same things we in the NHS have been up in arms about for a long time. But you’re saying it with a kind of moral outrage to those of us who are working in the system… pushing at an open door if you will.

The reason for my sarcastic post on page 2 was towards a poster who’d implied that the NHS could be fixed if only there were “more people like the OP”…. Which many of us HCP’s on this thread felt offended by, due to the very arguments you espouse.

Judging by the number of other posters who hit the “thanks” button, I spoke for many of us on this thread.

I know your outraged intentions are good but please step away from the outraged outpourings and employ a little tact and nuance as to whom you’re lecturing.

What about midwifery training? I do know women who retrained after having children.

MuckyPlucky
You are just hell bent on trying to win an argument even by lying about me. You want to think I am 'verbosely trumpeting' the same things. I am not being verbose neither 'trumpeting. Horrified, yes, to hear of the dreadful bullying such as parents being told to either split up and live at either end of the country and rip the family apart or leave the profession after investing over ten years of extremely hard study and exams and sleepless nights and being treated like dirt. You say things such as (people) 'felt offended by, due to the very arguments you espouse.' You mean my showing distress at the Junior Doctors conditions of work? e.g.
'Nobody in their thirties who has invested over ten years of hard graft and passed many exams should ever be told to live in Devon while their spouse is forced to go to Scotland and be separated from the children, then be given the option of leaving their career if they do not agree to the separation.' You mean, my saying this distresses those treated that way? I am sympathising with them!! Not to mention the other wrongs I am concerned to hear about.

Despite wanting me to think 'people' were offended by me, you say we are saying the same things! I have apologised for the clumsy thing I said and tried to explain why I get frstrated about people who suffer bad working conditions but treat it a martyrdom rather than being professional.

The crux is, I am a member of a different profession, you are in the one in the profession where you are suffering under the terrible ill-treatment of those who run.

I want to make sure everyone, ordinary working people not working in medicine, knows this is what is wrong in the Medical Profession. You, I would have expected, want people to know too.

But when you speak publicly you only scorn people who are not Medically qualified! Doctors are on strike, yet do the ordinary people, or even the quite well educated professional people have a clue as to why, except that they want more money? Because, and you may not like this, the Doctors themselves have done a very poor job of putting across to the public what it is that has made them so desperately upset; what actually the terrible conditions are. When I tried online to find out what their reasons were for striking. I found only one complaining there wasn't a chair in her office. As for pay, yes it's bad. But most people will look it up and say a junior doctor who has done internship and has GMC registration ( PLAB) can potentially earn between £2450 – £2900 (FY2-CT1) per month as basic pay with no on calls or out of hours and with those considerably more. Most ordinary people will not realise you have a lot of expenses and they will look at this as loads of money. Especially now because people are finding life hard.

I am trying to get Doctors to make their case so that they get a fair hearing and get the essential support of the country. Because, believe me, you need the general public behind you.

People do not know what you are complaining about.

They need it spelled out to them. There are so many groups being treated in an undignified and inhumane manner right now and Doctors won't get support unless they make a good case. There are disabled people losing benefit so losing their help and becoming housebound. They are having their Bank accounts investigated without any kind of reason. There are children being taken away from mothers because the mother asked for help when her Partner got rough. There are children in Adult Psychiatric Units and others in Psychiatric Hospitals 200 or 300 miles away from their parents. So many people need help and are banging on the door asking to be heard.

You really need to make it very clear to people what your grievances are and how they will cause people to leave Medicine and others not to apply.

In general Doctors as a profession do not communicate their needs and feelings to the public or Government very well. I have no idea why. I am not criticising but simply stating what I've seen over about 30-40 years of working near them.

To sum up; You really need to get across to the general public exactly what your circumstances are like when you become a Junior Doctor. Doctors need public support. The future of the Profession might depend on it right now. Things are so bad with the economy and there is such an inhumane approach to governing people and organisations now. We hear of the 'Fourth Industrial Revolution' and, whether we like it or not (it makes me feel ill), the well-being and happiness of individuals is not the priority of the powerful people who are forcing in these massive world-wide changes. Changes that will be reflected in Health Care most certainly.

Again I sincerely wish you all the best of luck and thank you for the great job you do under these hunger-games conditions.

I really must stop here. I have so much other stuff needing my time and as I said before, I have trouble seeing the screen.

@Itsdifferentnow not sure I know any F1s earning anywhere near those amounts. Most I've heard is £2,400 and that's with 3 lots of nights, lots of on calls and several late weeks in the 4 months.
Can you tell me where they can earn those huge amounts all the time ? I'm v sure that trust will be very popular !