Resident doctors synicsl strike again

[uneffingbelievable]

The resident doctors have once again announced a 6 day strike to co incide with a bank holiday weekend.

Whilst I support fair pay and working conditions I have lost all sympathy with them. This is not poverty when you are being paid as a whole package 40-95000 gross on a 44 hr week depending on your seniority.

The arguments about lack of jobs did not stack up with more jobs going to home graduates than IMGS despite the hysteria and a huge number of home graduates not even bothering to apply.

They are coming across as tone deaf and entitled or am I missing something.

To continue, @mumsneedwine ,

I am not suggesting that independent schools offer an inherently superior education. I do think selectivity frees them up to do more teaching, because less behaviour management - old MSc and even PhD students who have taken jobs in the independent sector really enjoy teaching the subject matter, whereas our graduates who teach in state schools are more focused on the pupils. That can be good for the pupils as people but it isn’t necessarily best for attainment. A delicate balance.

Again, this is not about peasants being stupid or any such nonsense.

Anyone could benefit from the self confidence of a school that brings out their talents, gives them the confidence to feel comfortable at Oxbridge, etc. The pupils in these schools may be lucky, which they may mistake for being superior.

I wonder how this plays into the issue of dissatisfied doctors? All academics are familiar with students whom we admitted because they overperformed at A level and interviewed well. When their peers catch up, they flounder. It is plausible that they stress more and more as medical training continues.

People are complex and it is impossible to generalise.

Lots of working people saves lives. Being a doctor is just a job, like any other. You don't see plumbers or electricians or greengrocers constantly threatening to go on strike because they are unhappy with their lot.

If they had good working conditions they would be less inclined to strike; and the rise is PAs is an insult to all the training doctors have done ... it would really stick in my craw if I was a medic. NHS trying to get a service on the cheap while leaving the real medics fighting for jobs.

The NHS is hardly "done on the cheap". It costs hundreds of billions a year.

@OonaStubbs posts are very unpleasant and ignorant about doctors. It is so sad to see someone carrying that around.

Somewhat ironic, to discuss my children's education, the funding of state education, private schools, NHS "underfunding" and PAs and then complain that the thread has lost its focus, don't you think?

The point about Cambridge, and the increased chances of privately educated students getting firsts, is that it occurred purely because Cambridge decided not to select on the basis of prior attainment, in an attempt to increase the proportion of a discrete subgroup of applicants - to "level the playing field" as you put it. When admission decisions were made on academic criteria, students from state schools and private schools had identical outcomes.

The problem with state education, as far as Oxbridge is concerned, is that pupils in the top quintile of nominally unselective state schools are 25x more likely to be accepted than children in the bottom quintile. I am not aware of comparable figures for medicine, but they are probably similar. This is clearly not related to funding, and does not have anything to do with private schools.

If WP applicants were "attaining excellent grades despite facing challenges along the way", medical schools would have been able to skew their intake in their favour without deprioritising academic attainment. But they were not reaching the high bar set by medical schools. So what has happened is that non-academic requirements replaced the academic. Medical school admission became substantially more complex, disadvantaging the pupils it was meant to help. UCAT is one example of this, it was intended to "level the playing field", instead it gives an advantage to applicants who have access to guidance, resources to practice, and if need be, to try again.

You may prefer to theorise about what makes a good doctor but prior attainment is the best predictor of postgraduate performance, without which career progression is not possible, and as McManus et al. concluded: "Passing examinations such as those discussed here is important for being a good doctor, and those who have difficulty in attaining such clinical knowledge will probably be less good doctors. Knowledge is generally preferable to ignorance, and clinical knowledge underpins clinical practice."

I have nothing against doctors, they do an important job. But some people raise them to such a ridiculously exalted status, like religious ministers used to be held in such high esteem.

Not a chance! Hopefully AI will take away some of the grunt work for juniors, and some specialties like radiology may be greatly affected, but we will still need human doctors.

And BTW these human doctors will need to have a wee but they can always do during a shift. I’m getting irritated by the trope of the busy resident doctor who has no time for a wee or food. Ridiculous. There is always time for a few minutes, even when working in A&E or doing the on call overnight in an acute hospital. Hyperbole doesn’t help the cause.

Anyway this was an interesting thread until the usual suspects got involved again. There probably needs to be a subforum as these threads always end up going down the same path.

AI can't take blood or insert central lines. It can't see a patient's tremor/ jaundice/palor it can't auscultate a chest or heart, it can't palpate an abdomen or if it come to it intubate or perform CPR- most resident drs will do these tasks multiple times every shift ( except for the central line/ intubation tbf). It is very difficult to see how AI is going to replace that.

And in my view also can’t take as good a history and synthesise a case as well as an experienced clinician. I expect it’s pretty good already at interpreting investigations. But history taking involves subtle skills that aren’t easily programmed, such as critically interpreting things that a patient does say, but also picking up the things they don’t say.

@mumsneedwine

I will finish my explanation to you with a piece of my own background, which informed my thinking.

In my home country UG education in many subjects is more flexible than in the UK (also cheaper). Talented final year high school pupils sometimes enrol in introductory modules, if they are lucky enough to live near a university. There is very little socioeconomic differentiation amongst them, as teachers recommend for enrolment, although possibly MC parents have sharper elbows.

It can be a bit daunting for the pupils, especially first term. I participated in a voluntary service to help them. We had a congenial study centre, provided snacks, tutoring, a certain amount of basic equipment, etc. This centre became a desirable place for some of the top pupils from all socioeconomic strata in our city to hang after school, each probably for several hours 2-3 days/wk, doing their schoolwork.

DC of doctors and lawyers and DC of dockworkers and cleaners. No one was thinking about that. They were happy to have an intellectual peer group, embedded in a university environment. Seeing with their own eyes lots of people being happily productive because they were intelligent was invaluable.

Another time, another country.

Still going ? Have you ever heard the phrase stop digging ?

Happy Easter

Have you heard the phrase 'try to be civil'?

I would have thought that someone who purports to be keen on widening participation would take seriously any intervention which might help.

To put it very kindly simply getting as many people as possible in to universities with the lowest possible entry requirements doesn't seem to be working in the longer term (the hope obviously was that they would catch up. The reality is they don't)

Yes, @mumsneedwine .
The sentence you found ‘utterly revolting’ at 19.45 yesterday was

A place to centre their studies with like minded peers is invaluable.

It never occurred to me that anyone could see this is socioeconomic terms. Eventually I realised that my rather lovely experience of this centre was formative for me as I explained earlier today.

Obviously you had no knowledge of that. As someone who works with YP from lower POLAR 4 quintiles, I thought you might be interested in things that work for them. The details would be different in the UK, but uni student volunteers can offer unique strengths.

When someone jumps to the worst possible interpretation of my statements and fails to acknowledge subsequent communication, I do feel free to make the full story extremely clear.

Thanks very much, @Scotiasdarling

I’ll have a great Easter now. Best wishes to everyone for the same, or a good day otherwise.