FIGHTING FOR FUTURE OF THE HEALTH SERVICE
Exploited staff are fleeing our cash-starved system
When you’re at breaking point, a survival instinct keeps you going. You don’t want to admit you can’t handle it, as you know you’ll be judged for it. You exist on a diet of “I’m fine!” and false optimism, waiting for someone to take pity on you and say you don’t have to pretend any more.
This is the NHS today, a nervous wreck surviving on sheer goodwill and a determination not to let anyone down. It can’t go on.
Patients unattended, cancelled operations, preventable deaths in overstretched hospitals – their origin is the same. A lack of investment in staff means recruitment and retention
levels are hurtling toward disaster. Disillusioned and knackered doctors and nurses are turning their backs on their vocation in terrifying numbers. Faced with long, backbreaking hours, unsympathetic working conditions, understaffed rotas, suffocating bureaucracy and risible remuneration, NHS staff are pressing the ejector seat as soon as they can.
The truth is that 10% of the UK’s nurses left the profession in 2017. Only half of junior docs stay beyond two years. I posted a message on a junior doctors’ group on Facebook for anyone to contact me if they were thinking of leaving.
I received so many emails it took me a full day to reply to them all. “I can’t think of anyone in my department who isn’t thinking of leaving”, said Sophie, a paediatrician. She describes a culture of expectation that wrings untold hours of extra work out of already exhausted staff. “There’s a fairly standard procedure that on a Thursday they’ll realise there’s no one to work the weekend,” she says.
“Names are drawn to decide who has to work, regardless of whether you’re a best man or have no one to look after your kid. Someone agrees.”
This disillusionment with a system which treats them with contempt is driving our most talented staff abroad.
Jack and his wife, both doctors, quit the UK for New Zealand when the strain got too much. “Working 70–80 hour weeks in intensive care and watching senior politicians say doctors were being greedy and letting patients die by not working weekends made us feel pretty small,” he says.
To make up the gap, we rely on staff from countries like Spain, Portugal and the Philippines. With Brexit, these staff are already looking elsewhere.
Ben, in his second year on the wards, hit breaking point: “Two doctors in my trust have taken their own lives, and I was days away from being number three, so I’ve left.”
So what’s the answer? Money. Investment. Something’s got to give. Your move, Mr Hunt...
Doctors’ names have been changed
This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay is published by Picador.