David Oliver: No wonder training grade doctors are unhappy

Being a junior doctor has never been an easy gig during my career. When I started I worked for nine years in 10 hospitals in seven towns, never staying in one place longer than a year. We did brutal “1 in 3” and “1 in 4” rotas, including 36 or 80 hour continuous on-call shifts. We got only a third of the base pay rate for each hour over the first 40. Just as now, we had professional exams to contend with but, worse than today, the lack of run-through training or matched training numbers meant that we could get stuck at one grade waiting for jobs—not least consultant jobs with ridiculous competition.We often received little in the way of induction, structured supervision, or appraisal and pastoral support. Any talk about wellbeing was patchy, in what was still quite a macho “get on with it” culture, and teaching styles often…
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