Can anyone explain the hierarchy of NHS doctors to me?

[TheBlonde]

I can never work out how "qualified" the person I see is
Obv there are consultants but where do SHOs and Registrars fit in?

I think consultant psychiatrists stay Dr (my brother and father). Never understood why that was so.
And neither of them wear bow ties by the way.

ahem tissy, my dear old dad was a consultant obgyn and was Mr in England. Maybe that was because he was a FRCOG. Anyway in Canada he turned back into a Dr.
This was in 1857, mind you, things have probably changed...

ah, he was also FRCS, maybe that's why

The Mr/Mrs/Miss thing dates back to many years ago when there was no effective anaesthesia and so surgery had to be pretty damn quick. Barbers and butchers were the early surgeons and their medical colleagues refused them the status of being called Doctor. Now if you are a surgical trainee then you gain status when you pass your exams to become a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons and revert back to Mr/Mrs/Miss.

Because psychiatrists aren't surgeons, not by any stretch of the imagination!

Doctors are broadly divided into two distinct halves; physicians (treat things with medicine) and surgeons (treat things with operations). They overlap a little (physicians can do endoscopy, radiologists can do interventions), surgeons do use medicines quite a lot.

In the old days surgeons weren't doctors- the specialty developed from BARBERS, who ran a side-line in removing bladder stones, so weren't allowed to call themselves "Doctor" hence "Mr Jones the ENT surgeon". Eventually, I can't remember when, it became a requirement for surgeons to have medical training, but they kept the title "Mr".

Nowadays, doctors are called doctor until they gain a Fellowship of one of the SURGICAL Royal colleges, then revert to Mr.

Here endeth the lesson

PPH, I think it depends where the fellowship was obtained, all our obs/gynae surgeons are "doctor" . I think you used to be able to go into obs/ gynae from a surgical background; now it is a branch all on its own, has its own college!

It's all changing by the way - the most junior doctors are now called Foundation Doctors - so you might hear that they're F1 or F2 doctors - this is docs in their first two years after medical school.

Then they become Specialty Trainees - so you'll hear that they're in ST1 (specialty training year 1) and then ST2 and so on - training lengths differ for each specialty, so they might finish when they're an ST3 or ST7 etc.

Then they get to be a consultant (if they're lucky and there are jobs..!).

Yes, Dottydot, that's the whole Modernising Medical Careers thing isn't it.

Deeply sceptical about the whole thing.

Thanks tissy, that's very clear. My brother has a doctorate, PhD and is a medical doctor but I suppose even there and even if he were a surgeon, people don't use those types of doctorates in professional life anyway, a bit non U.

house officer-senior house officer-reg-senior reg-consultant. there are 2 major areas in dr stuff- medicine and surgical. In general surgeons are referred to as MR., MISS or MRS and medical consultants are referred to as DRS.

Except psychologists and psychotherapists Xenia....they get very sniffy if they're not refered to as DR...but they are both Ph.Ds,( excep the new fangled psychologists who relatively recently have invented the doctorate of clin.psych...), it's very confusing for the patients....I once worked in a department where I was the only medical doctor but nearly everyone was called DR, then someone collapsed,( with a physical problem....),they all sat there in terrified silence..

a friend of DD1's from school graduated from med school last year; she is now Dr Ross, lol (I realise this is a bit old hat since G Clooney went on to greater things but I always had a bit of a thing for Doug )

Dentists are Dr in NZ, I'm pretty sure they were Misters (or Mrs) in the UK.