A junior had fun
You would be sleepless but we went out bowling on a Thursday and had a beer. When I speak to my juniors and describe that, it’s interesting that they would prefer it to the life they have.
“If you came in I would see you from admission to discharge, I would learn because I would see when I did not do things right or if I got it right I would get that rush from seeing I had nailed it.
“I would get 40 presents a week because people would say, ‘That’s Hugh, my doctor’. Now they don’t know who their doctor is.”
Prof Montgomery, 56, runs the intensive care unit at Whittington Hospital in north London when not carrying out research into genetics or testing human endurance and survival, having run three ultra marathons, climbed Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest mountain, and joined a research expedition on Everest.
He believes it is also time to have “a proper grown-up conversation with the public about what medicine can do and how much it costs and for what return.
“The bits that I find most stressful are when I am told I have to treat someone because the family say I must, and I have lost the authority to be able to say it is not appropriate and I won’t do it, and we end up with court cases.
“It is difficult because people have been informed by Holby and ER… it is brutalising and no one comes out of intensive care better than they were at their best.
“It is brutalising for juniors when they’re having to do things while thinking this is not really what I signed up for.
“We can end up prolonging deaths rather than saving lives, which doesn’t make you feel good.
“And if you are facing those moral conflicts and you’re not part of a team, people feel that emotional distress.”