Guest post: what we signed up for

I am so pleased to be able to publish this guest blog by River, writer of Hanging Round the Inkwell. She’s a doctor who’s had her fair share of bends in the medical career road, and talking to her is a solace to me. Her reflection is a pithy insight into something every doctor has either thought or been told after a tough day, and bears truths about the realities of being a doctor that the government still steadily refuses to acknowledge.

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“It’s what we signed up for.”

How often do you hear doctors say this? They describe some of the negative aspects of their job and then say ‘but I don’t mind because it’s what I signed up for’. I stayed late again, I missed my best friend’s wedding, I haven’t had a chance to pee in 12 hours, I’m exhausted after working 12 days in a row, I haven’t seen my family in ages… but it’s what I signed up for.

But is it though? Working as a doctor implies certain things. You will, at least at some point, have to be part of providing a 24/7 service which means you may work Christmas day and you will have to work some nights. You will have to deal with sick and dying people. You will have to have difficult conversations. You will have to take on responsibility.

Being a doctor, in and of itself, does NOT mean: having to work 12 days in a row, having to work 13 hour shifts, having to work without a break, having to cope with a workload that would be better suited to three or more people, having to stay late for non urgent reasons (usually on the whim of a senior colleague), having to explain to patients and relatives decisions and management plans made by other people, having to miss significant amounts of family time for a sustained period, having to miss events that are important to you and that you have given rota coordinators notice of. It does not mean having things dumped on you because other people can’t be bothered to deal with them.

So much and so many of the stresses of the job are, we are told, inevitable, part and parcel of being a doctor. We are told that they are what we signed up for. The fact is, for the vast majority of us this just isn’t true. We signed up to help people, to provide healthcare, to do applied human biology. For various reasons, and because of various interests and driving factors. We didn’t ‘sign up’ to be overstretched, to plug ever increasing gaps in an overstretched service, to work unsafe hours.

It would be possible to practice medicine in less relentless ways, and it would still be medicine, and we would still be doctors. Exhaustion and burnout aren’t what we signed up for and they shouldn’t be inevitable.

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