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| I’m proud to be called a junior doctor. Titles are the least of our problems | I’m proud to be called a junior doctor. Titles are the least of our problems |
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| Tue 10 Oct 2017 16.57 BST | |
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| Until Jeremy Hunt chose to weaponise the term, I didn’t give my status as a junior doctor a second’s thought. Sure, it was a bit of a misnomer. I’m the wrong side of 40 and a mother of two, after all. But to me, the doctor bit was all that mattered. After six years of study, I was, at last, a doctor – my privilege, joy, and source of pride and inspiration. Even better, I was an NHS doctor. | Until Jeremy Hunt chose to weaponise the term, I didn’t give my status as a junior doctor a second’s thought. Sure, it was a bit of a misnomer. I’m the wrong side of 40 and a mother of two, after all. But to me, the doctor bit was all that mattered. After six years of study, I was, at last, a doctor – my privilege, joy, and source of pride and inspiration. Even better, I was an NHS doctor. |
| Fast forward to last summer and the painful, ugly denouement of junior doctors’ dispute with the government over their terms of employment. Throughout the preceding year, the Department of Health spin doctors truly threw everything they had at their medical cousins. Junior doctors were branded “militants” – “extremists” to be punished for our impunity by a pumped-up health secretary who chose to threaten us with a “nuclear option”. Anyone would think he was Donald Trump and we were North Korea. | Fast forward to last summer and the painful, ugly denouement of junior doctors’ dispute with the government over their terms of employment. Throughout the preceding year, the Department of Health spin doctors truly threw everything they had at their medical cousins. Junior doctors were branded “militants” – “extremists” to be punished for our impunity by a pumped-up health secretary who chose to threaten us with a “nuclear option”. Anyone would think he was Donald Trump and we were North Korea. |
| Language, by this stage, mattered. The more we were infantilised, smeared or built up to be enemies of the state, the more junior doctors wore our label as a badge of pride. Junior doctor came to stand for everything we – and the majority of the public at the time – suspected the government was not. Honesty and integrity. Telling the truth about what was really happening in the NHS, instead of glossing over an inconvenient narrative. We were trusted, in short, because we were junior doctors, even while the government sought to denigrate that term. | Language, by this stage, mattered. The more we were infantilised, smeared or built up to be enemies of the state, the more junior doctors wore our label as a badge of pride. Junior doctor came to stand for everything we – and the majority of the public at the time – suspected the government was not. Honesty and integrity. Telling the truth about what was really happening in the NHS, instead of glossing over an inconvenient narrative. We were trusted, in short, because we were junior doctors, even while the government sought to denigrate that term. |
| To see the chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, wading into the debate over junior doctor morale by arguing that, apparently, what we could really do with right now is “modern names” to ensure we “get the respect [we] deserve” is a surprise. While I’m all for efforts to improve morale, might I suggest that with the NHS winter crisis looming, one in 10 junior doctor posts lying empty, 16% of NHS jobs unfilled and endemic understaffing imperilling everyone’s efforts at keeping patients safe, what we are called is the least of our problems. | To see the chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, wading into the debate over junior doctor morale by arguing that, apparently, what we could really do with right now is “modern names” to ensure we “get the respect [we] deserve” is a surprise. While I’m all for efforts to improve morale, might I suggest that with the NHS winter crisis looming, one in 10 junior doctor posts lying empty, 16% of NHS jobs unfilled and endemic understaffing imperilling everyone’s efforts at keeping patients safe, what we are called is the least of our problems. |
| If Davies really wants to bolster rock-bottom morale among juniors, she could publicly lobby the government to address the gaps that cripple every junior doctor rota. She could argue for proper hospital rest facilities so that never again does a junior doctor kill themselves while driving home from a night shift, having fallen asleep at the wheel. She could demand a public inquiry into the recent spate of junior doctor suicides, because no one’s conditions of work should ever make them feel suicidal, least of all those who save lives for a living. She could, in short, campaign for meaningful action, not a conveniently cost-neutral name change. | If Davies really wants to bolster rock-bottom morale among juniors, she could publicly lobby the government to address the gaps that cripple every junior doctor rota. She could argue for proper hospital rest facilities so that never again does a junior doctor kill themselves while driving home from a night shift, having fallen asleep at the wheel. She could demand a public inquiry into the recent spate of junior doctor suicides, because no one’s conditions of work should ever make them feel suicidal, least of all those who save lives for a living. She could, in short, campaign for meaningful action, not a conveniently cost-neutral name change. |
| Her intervention is peculiarly focused on style, not substance, at a time when no one – apart from the government – believes the NHS can avoid another humanitarian crisis this winter. It really doesn’t matter what you call us: there simply aren’t enough of us to keep patients safe. With the NHS quietly imploding, staff at every level of seniority are pleading for more doctors, more nurses, more beds, more resources – not the distraction of a manufactured debate about job titles. | Her intervention is peculiarly focused on style, not substance, at a time when no one – apart from the government – believes the NHS can avoid another humanitarian crisis this winter. It really doesn’t matter what you call us: there simply aren’t enough of us to keep patients safe. With the NHS quietly imploding, staff at every level of seniority are pleading for more doctors, more nurses, more beds, more resources – not the distraction of a manufactured debate about job titles. |
| I suppose it serves a convenient purpose to have junior doctors bickering among themselves about what they would like to be known as. But the fact is, my NHS colleagues and I are pretty united in what we most desire. Fully staffed jobs in which we feel supported, safe and able to provide high-quality care to patients. Working conditions that don’t reduce us to tears. And – please, just once, just maybe – a government that comes clean about the desperate overstretch the NHS faces currently, and its punitive consequences for staff and patients alike. | I suppose it serves a convenient purpose to have junior doctors bickering among themselves about what they would like to be known as. But the fact is, my NHS colleagues and I are pretty united in what we most desire. Fully staffed jobs in which we feel supported, safe and able to provide high-quality care to patients. Working conditions that don’t reduce us to tears. And – please, just once, just maybe – a government that comes clean about the desperate overstretch the NHS faces currently, and its punitive consequences for staff and patients alike. |
| • Dr Rachel Clarke is a speciality doctor in palliative medicine in Oxford | • Dr Rachel Clarke is a speciality doctor in palliative medicine in Oxford |
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