Well all the nhs problems are down to women apparently

[louloutheshamed]

Dm link coming up....

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2532461/Why-having-women-doctors-hurting-NHS-A-provovcative-powerful-argument-leading-surgeon.html

Especially those pesky intelligent women who train for years at the taxpayers expense and then become gps, have children and go part time.

What gives me rage about this is the way it is presented ther women have children by some form of immaculate conception or that asexual reproduction that plants do, not that women have children with men who actually need to step up to their child care responsibilities so that 'woman going part time after children' is not the default automatic option.

Reading your first post, then, lunar, she shouldn't have changed her return date from 4 months when baby was 3 months, as that was only 4-5 weeks notice of the change.

If she breached the law and HR chose not to pull her up on it, that's more to do with the individual case than with maternity rights and how they pertain to doctors. I really hope your husband wouldn't take against another female consultant for this reason, any more than he'd take against another male consultant if the last one he worked with always knocked off early or threw sickies.

So why not give "parental leave" that can be split equally between mothers and fathers as in many other countries?

Paternity leave should be compulsory. Women tend to only give birth once in a year (excluding multiple births) and only 2 - 3 times in total.

The article falls down on so many levels, including that male GPs are also going part time, retiring early or emigrating (as I've just done). As Pacfic Dogwood said, being a full time GP in the UK is being on the path to burn out. There used to be an element of goodwill, where doctors would go above and beyond because they felt valued, now it's day in day out criticism in the media, reduced autonomy, tick box medicine and arse covering and the good will is all but gone. The medical workforce (like any workforce) will work hardest when it's valued.

Morethanpotatoprints "My only objection tbh is having too many appointments cancelled because the nurse or doctor had to go home to their sick child.
My appointment is more important than a sick child who should be looked after by somebody else. Male or Female, I couldn't give a shit."

A child only has one mum and dad to comfort them when they're unwell. A patient can see any doctor if it's urgent, or wait for their preferred doctor if it isn't. I don't think your appointment is more important than a parent being with their sick child. And I'm not a parent!

I wonder if this devaluation of GPs has arisen, in part, because more and more women have entered that sphere (in a similar manner to those jobs where salaries decrease as women enter that particular workplace).

Yyy, jobs that are done by women start to become devalued. Maybe that is because we talk ourselves down?

I also think devaluation of GPs has something to do with the increased idea of our "rights". Doctor as God has gone and that is a good thing, but I was horrified a couple of months ago when I was sitting waiting for my DH in the doctor's surgery to see there was a notice saying that there had been 240 'no shows' for GP appointments in the previous month. That is outrageous - patients basically arrogantly saying that their time is much more valuable than their doctor's time and that they couldn't even be arsed to pick up the phone and say they couldn't come.

Sometimes intelligent people can be astonishingly dim. Prof Meirion Thomas hasn't done much thinking about this at all, has he? Has he not noticed that traditionally many male consultants work part-time so they can do private practice?

He's got a nasty attitude to general practice as well, sneering at them that they aren't hospital doctors. I'd like to see him cope with the average GP's day - diagnostic uncertainty is much greater for them than for him, because the GP has already weeded out patients who don't need to see him.

And of course he's got a fecking outrageous attitude to women, and hasn't stopped to consider any of the structural issues that cause women to be side-lined. Oh, what a hero he is, sitting on fecking committees.

"Maybe that is because we talk ourselves down?" Not sure about that. I think media and men with privilege can talk women down quite happily without being encouraged by us. lunar1's DH is quite happy for one woman's maternity leave and the problems it's caused (which in the main have not been caused by her) to cloud his entire opinion of women. I doubt a man whose actions had caused problems would cause him to rethink about employing men. He has basically devalued women based on the actions of his HR department. That's male privilege for you though.

I'm sure a large number of female doctors don't actually have children at all. How on earth would he judge which medical school candidates would pay back there training debt to society?

The answer to more gender balance in the workplace has to be more men working part time rather than fewer women taking up important jobs in the first instance.

I find it interesting that as soon as a profession becomes female dominated we worry, yet male dominated professions are not seen as as troublesome.

Yy scallops.

Yes wonderstuff - your last sentence. We are always reading about professions becoming 'feminised', whether it's medicine, teaching, the BBC etc. with the unspoken insinuation that this is a bad thing and masculine is the default. And often, e.g. the BBC, it is far less than 50% of the jobs that have gone to women despite us being 51% of the population. Yet has anyone ever heard of something becoming 'masculinised'?

YY wonderstuff and grimbletart. It's that low-level persistent misogyny that goes unnoticed by many because they don't even acknowledge (or realise) that male is default so everything else needs to be questioned.

I know in teaching women generally have to be better than any male candidate because we need more men in education. I wonder if there is a bias towards women in this way elsewhere?

Would there be anything so very wrong with training MORE doctors, so that we are not left with too few if some (men and women) work fewer hours? There are plenty of would be medics out there desperate for the limited places currently availably...

Anyway, now that youngsters are set to work to near 70, the years they are PT with DC will be a small proportion of their working lives. Attrition for other reasons, which will apply equally to both genders, is more likely.

I think that morally the fact that we, as one of the richest nations on earth, employ huge numbers of doctors and nurses that have been trained in much poorer nations, is a bigger dilemma than training people who go part time for a few years.

I notice that the stats for obstetrics weren't included in the DM article. Wonder why.

The answer is to stop educating girls then surely - and sop encouraging ambition - they will only go off and have babies wont they?

I think that's his point, Joining, he's just not very honest about it!