@Intrepidescape You clearly know nothing about medical training in the UK and frankly it’s embarrassing that you feel qualified to talk such rubbish.
You don’t just ‘become a consultant’. To become a consultant you need to be on a training scheme. Training schemes have a defined period of time in training, you can’t leapfrog that. There are exams that you have to sit (many of which you have to have been in training for x number of years before you can apply). Even if you’re in a specialty where you can sit your exams whenever and have gained all your competencies you still have to serve your time on the wards.
Ward work is often arguably not the best use of decades of medical training (a lot of admin jobs) though there is important experience to be gained (e.g. the actual ‘medicine bit’ - reviewing deteriorating patients, making management plans etc) but most wards are so short staffed juniors struggle to get off them to go to clinic, theatres etc. This means that training has to be extended (or you work for free on your days off which plenty of my colleagues do) to get this experience. Thus is becomes even longer to ‘become a consultant’. In terms of what good does ward work do for patients? Somebody has to take the bloods, do clinical skills (in many NHS trusts it’s made increasingly difficult for nurses/allied HCAs to train to do bloods, cannulas etc due to bureaucracy and staffing so they become ‘doctor jobs’), write discharge letters and prescriptions, refer for tests/other specialty opinions (and chase these tests, jump through various hoops to get them organised), rewrite drug cards and all the other jobs that mean patients progress through their inpatient stay. Training jobs are often used as service provision/to prop up failing departments with little regard to a doctors educational/training needs in order to progress.
There are huge issues with medical training. Mostly being the lack of acknowledgement that doctors are people with lives outside the hospital. I have a friend who hasn’t been told where she’ll be working from August for example. She’s been told they hope to know in May. The furthest hospital she could be sent to is two hours away. She has a mortgage here and a kid in school. How can that possibly be justified? You can’t refuse to go either as it’s a monopoly employer. You say no, you lose your place on the scheme (and thus your training number, once you’ve lost that you’re not getting trained in that specialty anywhere). A junior doctor is anyone between fresh out of medical school and a month before qualifying as a consultant. We’re therefore (mostly) adults in our 20s and 30s thus at the age where you want to get married, have children etc. I know people who had leave pulled for their own weddings the week before with no apology or acknowledgment. I’ve recently had a miscarriage - my doctor husband couldn’t get time off to come to scans with me so I was told my baby had no heartbeat on my own. He ended up going off sick for a couple of days to grieve, when he got back his rota manager had a word with him about absence and said if it happened again he’ll have to have a chat with the training scheme about his ‘professional behaviours’. My husband is an obstetrician.
As for losing the support of the general public, I don’t believe they like us very much to begin with. I don’t know a single colleague who hasn’t been verbally or physically abused (and obviously I don’t count abuse from patients who don’t have capacity). I was punched in the face on my first job out of medical school by an adult man because I couldn’t guarantee what ward he would be admitted to when he was transferred to a different hospital. Another pregnant colleague was punched in the stomach because she wasn’t available immediately to talk to a (stable) patient’s relative as she was dealing with an emergency elsewhere on the ward. As for not advocating for ourselves - there’s a huge push for industrial action at the minute (got my strike ballot through this morning), do you honestly think the current government cares about any of this though?