The disturbing truth of a junior doctor’s workload
Everyone whinges about work. Most of us in employment can be relied upon to regularly declare ourselves cruelly overworked, not to mention grossly underpaid. But if (Channel 4) was to be believed – and on the evidence presented, it was hard not to – the bright young things of our National Health Service are getting an especially raw deal.
Filmed on the wards of Northampton General Hospital late last year, the series made no bones about where its sympathies lay. Every person featured said the same thing. Junior doctors are horribly overstretched and overstressed – more so than ever before. And it’s a symptom of a greater and more worrying malaise: an NHS that cannot cope with the pressure it is currently under.
The experiences of the three young medics featured in this opening episode were simply intolerable. You couldn’t want for a more competent and unflappable first-timer than Holly Lomas. On her very first day at work she was plunged into the emergency unit and dealt with everything thrown at her, even when left to manage alone. She was a credit to the five years’ medical training already invested in her. Yet just two months into the job, she was so ground down by long hours and impossible demands that she doubted her ability to cope long-term.
Second-year doctor Sam Pollen’s experience was still more revealing. He was battling a workload twice what it should be and his complaint at not having time even to talk to patients was borne out when a five-minute chat, which he finally carved out for one, yielded the relatively simple key to a condition that had baffled consultants for months. But disillusionment and exhaustion won out soon after, and Pollen quit his job.
That reflected the most disturbing fact of many put forward by this documentary. The NHS is haemorrhaging its future: one in every 10 junior doctors is currently quitting over the demands of a system that’s been pushed to breaking point. That is not only a shocking waste of talent and training but an indictment of those who should be ensuring that the taxpayer money poured into their education pays off in the long run. Confessions of a Junior Doctor balanced politics with human stories, and it rang with a truth of experience that no politician’s waffle could hope to counter.
Apart from a snap election, one sure sign economic optimism is taking hold is when property shows begin to proliferate in the prime-time schedules. Now the queen of TV property developers, Sarah Beeny, whose Channel 4 series Property Ladder went the way of Lehman Brothers and the hopes of countless homebuyers during the last credit crunch, is making a comeback. How to Live Mortgage Free with
Sarah Beeny (Channel 4) is aimed at those who dream of “an alternative to a lifetime of mounting debt and high monthly repayments”. That’ll be most of us, then.
Beeny set off to find those who have bucked the system by building homes on unwanted brownfield sites or buying properties that were unmortgageable to begin with. One Walthamstow couple had been living so frugally that they paid off their £235,000 mortgage in nine years. The problem was that Beeny’s unalloyed devotion to the notion of financial freedom meant the hard-headed practicalities, and especially the downsides, were often downplayed.
In the case of one young woman who converted a rust-bucket barge into a minuscule home on a shoestring budget – the glaring question of how she had, in practice, transformed the interior from utterly uninhabitable to well equipped and comfortably chic on a supposed budget of just £1,000 was, incredibly, never properly explored. Nor was the desirability of a home that, by law, one has to move every two weeks and condemns you to solitary nights in a one-bed floating target tied up along towpaths in the middle of nowhere, ever touched upon.
This was a show that had plenty of charm and optimism. And, having got through one vicious downturn, it’s not that it’s wrong to go back to peddling property fantasies. (People have to dream, especially when it’s all they can afford to do.) It’s just that almost all these stories could have been more interesting, and useful, had the enormous effort involved been presented more realistically.