(The Lancet, The Lancet, 21 Oct. 2017) In a letter published online this week, David Matthews from the Oxford Health Alliance suggests abandoning the term “junior” to address the low morale of UK “trainee” hospital doctors, aged between 23 and 40 years. This proposal, supported by Sally Davies, the UK's Chief Medical Officer, is well intentioned, but an intervention beyond re-branding is urgently needed, ...
It is not only the label that is damaging, but also the culture and mechanics of a system that rotates doctors between hospitals 60–70 miles apart every 6–12 months for up to 15 years, usually with less than 6 weeks' notice of destination and salary, and requires doctors to give 6–8 weeks' notice for leave requests and organise their own cover on increasingly understaffed rotas, but can change their schedule with less than 24 h notice. Junior doctors work in an overburdened system in which “protected” training opportunities are increasingly lost to service provision, where public sector pay has been frozen for 7 years, https://fizzslots.de and against the backdrop of losing a bitter industrial dispute that decreased salaries for new doctors and increased antisocial hours for all trainees, ...read the full text ...
Read also: Junior hospital doctors—time to rethink the terminology
The Lancet: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/issue/current