Perhaps some politicians do care
Posted on Sunday 15th March 2009
My parents have interested their local MP in the plight of junior doctors slighted by the chaotic implementation of changes to the training structure. Recently she requested that I email her with an insight from someone who became a casualty of the MMC or Making Medics Cry as we dubbed it. Attached an excerpt of what I wrote so some of you can get a better idea of why we came to be in Adelaide:
MMC left a number of doctors at a similar stage in their training in a virtual no-man’s land. We were too junior to finish and at the same time too senior to start again. I’m sure I could have found “a” job, but in real terms I was facing a dead-end in my career. This was exacerbated by the employment freeze that many trusts implemented with the element of uncertainty during the year before the MMC roll-out. After being offered only 2 interviews after applying for over 15 jobs in 4 months, I started to panic and the prospect of looking abroad became the only viable option.
Within a month of seeking work in Australia, I had already been offered 2 jobs, and the better one without even needing to interview. This almost seemed too good to be true, but I accepted and we left for Adelaide in January 2007. Since then I have (touch wood!) had little difficulty in not only staying in employment, but also obtaining good quality training posts. Australia has also presented many opportunities that would not have been available in the UK. Just as an example I have become a Clinical Lecturer with the University of Adelaide, do aeromedical retrievals, am currently undertaking a clinical trial and have published a review article in a peer-reviewed journal. My career is back on course, and I have completed my 2nd year of advanced training with the Joint Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine.
Australia is not just open opportunities for all, but the culture of “looking after one’s own” that used to exist in the NHS 10 years ago seems to be actively supported here. As with most Western health systems there is a sizeable proportion of overseas doctors here, and most of them are only here temporarily. So when I have told colleagues that I am planning to stay, their whole attitude changes and the support network kicks in. My previous job was obtained through links between training directors at two Adelaide hospitals, and I landed my current one by chatting the Medical Director and simply expressing an interest in doing retrieval medicine. It is a shame that this spirit of camaraderie has been lost in an increasingly cut-throat and selfish culture amongst NHS doctors.
On a day-to-day basis, working in Australia is not dissimilar to the NHS. Medicare is also a government-funded free-at-point-of-delivery public health system. Many people have a misconception that Australia is a second-world nation with substandard healthcare, but nothing could be further from the truth. Intensive Care Medicine is a discreet speciality here, so I would argue that the quality of critical care is superior to the average jobbing-anaesthetist-run unit in a British DGH. I am currently working towards a Fellowship exam, and my seniors constantly push us to improve and develop our skills and knowledge.
Working conditions are generally very good, with our average working week set at 38 hours. There is, of course, considerable potential for picking up overtime hours to supplement income. On balance I have taken a pay cut coming here, but we have fewer outgoing expenses and utilities are much cheaper. This has resulted in a very comfortable standard of living and certainly on a par to what we enjoyed in the UK. Most doctors here work and play hard, and it is not unusual to have colleagues with a variety of outside interests. We are usually rostered on for 4 days, and then have 3 – 4 days off. This effectively provides annual leave in the normal working fortnight, which came as a rather pleasant surprise versus the NHS for which we effectively worked every weekday.
Not the most eloquent description of what the last 3 years of my working life has entailed, but I thought it might be of some interest to those of you wonder if our move was worth it or not.
I would say on the basis of what you have written above it most definitely was!
There have been similar things going wrong in teaching in Scotland. The scottish government ensures that you get a one year post, guaranteed and salaried, in order to do your probationary year to get full registration. Which sounds great, and it’s an improvement on the previous system where registration took two years, and you were not guaranteed a job, so it took some people six years. However, when the year is up, so quite often is the job. And that’s after a year in which you could have been sent anywhere in Scotland, with no means of appeal if it was a long way from where you live! The only time I have ever been signing on was after I’d just gained my full teaching registration.
Does the world owe us a living? Of course not, but there needs to be genuinely long-term planning for providing people with job security. In Scotland, the perception was that the baby boomer generation was about to retire and free up a whole lot of jobs. However, as is happening in other fields too, many people are opting not to, worried that they cannot afford to retire. Given that a third of your life could be spent in retirement, chances are many people started paying into a pension when this wasn’t the expected outcome.
Despite the poisonous propaganda spread by newspapers like the Daily Mail and the like in the UK, the threat to jobs is not from immigrants, but rather the fact that the job security that is needed cannot be found in the UK, so people quite reasonably go abroad. This month is twenty-five years since Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill went head to head over the Miners, systematically wrecking the unions, and the lack of job security is getting worse in the UK.
The world does not owe us a living, for sure, but when you have trained and focused yourself on following a career path, it isn’t unreasonable to wish to follow it!