JUNIOR DOCTORS: Is their patience running out?
Channel 4 put forth an intimate
and honest look into the life of a junior doctor’s first taste of their career
in a hospital environment, complete with patients in critical condition within the
first three hours of one woman’s day and another deciding whether oncology is
the field in which she wants to specialise. Set in Northampton General
Hospital, the documentary follows the junior doctors paralleled with the
inescapable truth of the deteriorating state of the NHS causing moral amongst
professionals to be low. Doctors are an incredibly vital aspect of any society,
and it is even more vital that there are people willing to commit themselves to
the years long training to ensure the care and support that patient’s need is
able to be provided. Yet it appears that the biggest problem is not finding individuals,
but rather ensuring that they are able to actually do their job once they have
completed training and feel able to continue their career within the NHS.
The number of junior doctors
leaving the NHS is increasing, with a surplus of hospitals facing the perpetual
challenge of having enough of them on the wards to deal with the demands of
patients. This is only further accentuated by the fact that many straight A
students are not being accepted into medical schools in the UK and are being
forced to study abroad due to the focus being transposed to the recruitment of doctors
as opposed to training. Leading cancer surgeon Dr J Meirion Thomas explained
that the government must act by ‘increasing the number of places on courses’ to
be able to sustain the 13,000 doctors registered by the NHS each year.
Unfortunately, the problems don’t stop there. An aspect of the
documentary which is intertwined in almost every scene is the fact that the NHS
is working to its full capacity. In many instances there will be simply no beds
to offer to incoming patients, and doctors often describe feelings of guilt and
frustration at the lack of resources and time that mean they cannot provide the
expertise they have trained so hard to gain and want desperately to employ.
When one ward in a hospital is facing difficulties, such as an influx of
patients or a shortage of doctors, that pressure is then filtered into every
other ward to try and relieve the intensities elsewhere. Despite the evidence,
there is a political juxtaposition of opinions on the state of the NHS. When
the Red Cross rendered the NHS to be in a ‘humanitarian crisis’, highlighted by
Jeremy Corbyn in a Prime Minsters Questions session, Theresa May responded by
saying the phrase was ‘irresponsible and overblown’. It can be said that the UK
healthcare system is not only battling internal problems, but also a political
struggle to relay the measure that must be taken in order to improve it.
The truth of being a doctor is then very seldom will it be a nine to
five job, and as many hopeful medical students will understand, embarking on a
such a career will be both mentally and physically taxing, particularly if no
changes are made in the coming years. It’s a shame that something so sacred is
often incredibly overlooked and mishandled, but at the same time it only adds
more value to the healthcare workers who carry on despite the copious amount of
obstacles, and those who are determined to cement their place in the workforce
also. The hope must be that the drive is not diminished by a lack of care for
our doctors.
Please let us know your thoughts
on this topic and the documentary!
Written by Vicale Czan Alfanti
Universal Medicine
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