A 'How to' guide for Sixth Formers
Around the age of 15 elect to do largely Science "A" levels. Five would be good. Give up football and macrame. Get straight A or A* grades or bin the UCAS form now. Take a gap year by all means, but stuff the rucksack. Head for the nearest Nursing Home and show you care.
Charm your way into Medical School. Forget integrity, intelligence or initiative. You will need humility, dedicated self-abnegation and a total absence of critical faculties. The Emperor is indeed a naked fruit-bat but don't ever say so. Spend five or six years running up awesome debts. Expect to be endlessly harassed by numpties with shit-for-brains and envy for attitude. Try to pass your Finals first time. There are many more expensive exams to come and it will help to keep your loans within the National Debt.
Communication skills notwithstanding, you are now a Junior Doctor. Get used to it. You will remain a "junior" doctor for at least the next ten years. You will move around a lot. You will be pushed around a lot. You will not earn a lot.
As you enter your fourth decade, with luck(and I do mean luck, MMC is not going to get any better), you might be making enough to start paying off your debts. You will not be making enough to get a mortgage. Marry someone who is and stop whingeing.
By the time you are 35, unless your partner is into self-help in a big way you may be divorced, but you could be competing in the salary stakes with the minor middle-manager who is intercepting your investigations or referrals and making mince of your medical expertise. Your hours will be longer than his and perhaps a tad on the anti-social side. Your daily diet will be death, despair and destruction but you will not mind any of this. Remember you're divorced Dearheart, and anyway entirely dedicated to repaying your debt to society; the quarter of a million pounds it cost the penurious people to train you, every penny usurped from the righteous War on Terror.
At least 50%* of you will be women. YOU will be having babies on the side, divorced or not. This is why God made women multitaskers.
When you are 40 your future will have been decided. You might unfortunately be scrap-heaped, considered untrainable despite your PhD, MRCP, FRCS, whatever plastic shibboleth. You could be a salaried serf, gratefully bending the knee and your principles to United Wealth in exchange for a small slice of the action and your mortgage repayments. Some few of you will have toughed it out and become Consultants, GP principals or whatever bloody-minded, independent doctors are called in the parlous future.
Yes, you few will have made it. You are now officially workshy, greedy tossers intent on screwing the sick and the sorrowful while destroying the NHS to finance your wildly affluent, idle lifestyles. Strangely, 90% of the patients you are so screwing will still affect to trust you above all others. This trust will not translate into your litigation and complaint-strewn working life. It will NEVER be acknowledged by managers or politicians and their Press puppets. The underlying assumption, despite any evidence to the contrary, will be that Mammon has you by the mammaries.
THIS is the dichotomy that might finally do your head in. You are now in real danger and so are your patients. Despair, drudgery, drink, drugs or medical politics? The choice is yours. Wise up or crack up.
Whatever you decide, make mine a large one. And send the bill to the BMA. They owe me.
*Up to 75% of you in some areas will be female - Ed. The piece was reproduced from DNUK with the consent of the author.
Dr Rant
Dr Cardigan
Dr Blue
Dr Brown
Rev Dr Green
Dr Mustard
Mr Orange
Dr Pink
Dr Purple
Mr Salmon
Dr White
Mr Beige
Ms Scarlet
Dr Informed
11 comments:
"Competing in the salary stakes with a middle manager" by the time you're 35. "middle Manager" AfC Band 8B say: 34K to 47K. As a GP mid 30s are high earning years. Many docs will have 2 or 3 years a as aconsultant under their belt by then: £75K. I'm not saying you're not worth it but worth keeping things in perspective.
By the way: only a tiny minority AfC staff are in band 8B and above: one in 40.
The Attached is salutory I think.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/jan/29/workandcareer
"Are you one of those poor souls in a family that earns £88,000 or more a year? On average, you struggle to take two foreign holidays a year when not squeezed in a hovel worth more than £390,000 and get by on £20,000-plus of disposable cash annually. But you don't feel rich at all, according to a survey by the insurance company Hiscox."
s.personalfinancenews
Great stuff, Dr Rant - saying this sort of thing is exactly why I'm not asked to talk at the local careers fair for sixth formers considering medicine any more!
Entirely predictable repsonse from "NHS Manager" - I've no doubt his facts are right and you generalised a bit so it read better, but I'm afraid that the numpties my local PCT employs hardly stand comparison with "middle managers" in the real world/business, and certainly don't display the requisite intelligence or qualifications to have qualified for medical school. So pointing out that some of these intellectual vacuums earn offensively more than the poor bastards doing the junior doctor donkey work well into their 30's while the idiot managers' "bright ideas" make it more difficult is entireley legitimate.
You know I have some sympathy with GP's and Consultants. the constant changing targets and initiatives amongst other things. But these types of posts just make me frustrated and reminds me of the type of whinging more common to teachers. If you earn over £58k as a full time male worker you are in the top 10% of earners in England (for women working full time you only need to earn over £38k to put you in the top 10% of earners)>
So whilst I am sure there are managers that are overpaid and maybe some not very good at their job, lets get some perspective here. GP's and Consultants are in comparison to the rest of the population well paid.
If we're going to start talking 'averages' and 'centiles', then I can assure you that for every one of me, there's more than 99 people out there who have invested less of their own time, money and sanity in getting as well trained and educated as me.
Fuck the top 10%. There are people out there who earn multiples of my income for alot less work and commitment.
and lets face it des anyone do a more imprtant job? cant put a price on healthin my view; and no one slags asynaptic footballers for earning in a week what i earn in a year
"You are now officially workshy, greedy tossers intent on screwing the sick and the sorrowful while destroying the NHS to finance your wildly affluent, idle lifestyles." What do you expect the public attitude to be in a society that is based on class envy? Stop whinging, Comrade. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Look there is always going to be someone who earns more than you for in your view less time and skill. In a way thats irrelevant.
Your post was all about how Consultants, Dr's etc. are low paid in comparison to others. Like most people I think that needs to be justified. Just saying vaguely there are others that get paid a lot more for a lot less is meaningless. And Dr. Minge quoting overpaid footballers as a comparison doesn't exactly win the argument.
If you think you are genuinely underpaid for what you do, then please use a logical argument to justify this rather than just being offensive.
I am a junior doc. I will be for the next 7 or so years (and I am an ST something or SPR whatever) and I have been a doc for 7 years. I am 31. By the time I hit 35 I will be very, very lucky to hit 55K (basic plus banding). I admit that this is not peanuts - but at least it is the truth compared to your post. To say that I will have "2 or 3 years" under my belt as a consultant by my mid 30s shows how out of touch you are with those you manage. What sort of professional docs do you employ? But that said I will only work 56 hours per week (max) until '09 and then 48 thereafter. How much shit is that? I do that in a normal “official” working week with no on call commitment at all, let alone what I really work. I frequently do 48 hours in 4 days. Of course whatever our rota says we do will comply with policy whether or not we can actually do our job or not. So if you can tell me which trust/PCT will offer me 75K PA by my mid 30s then send me a pack and I will sign up because in the real world of junior docs your pay myth does not happen. If you want a touch of evidence check out the the bmjcareers website and click on salary scales (perhaps the only thing the BMA are good for). For once it is a source of factual anecdotes rather than mythical "evidence."
Dr Angry
PS you could, of course, be a consultant of 5 years by yoiur mid 30s under the MTAS/MMC. Apparently, your skill set and experience will be the same as those who worked twice as long and twice as hard.
I am 34. I have been a junior doctor for 10 1/2 years, with one more to go. After that, I will have the privilege of scrabbling around looking for a consultant post, in a buyer's market. In my 10 1/2 years, I have worked in 12 hospitals in 5 regions, living at 7 addresses. Because of this, I have no house/mortgage. Ignoring the mountain that is university debt (6 yrs, with long hours and short holidays presenting few chances for holiday jobs), I have spent tens of thousands of pounds on exams and courses, because even when the course is essential and compulsory the hospital usually backs out of paying for it, even after promising to. I can only think of one job in which I managed to take my full holiday entitlement. I cannot think of any where any of us were compensated, as entitled, for lost leave. At the end of my first year I calculated that the NHS owed me over 20 days back for unpaid overtime. I dread to think what it amounts to now, but suspect I could take most of the rest of the year off and still be in credit. I have worked 72 hour plus weekends (yes, as in start on the Friday, finish on the Monday, no break), and full weeks of nights, and every combination in between. I have completed a 24 hour shift from a wheelchair, because I had an injury such that I could not walk but there was noone else. I have worked rotas where fewer than half of the doctors actually existed (and the theoretical number would have been the lowest for a legal rota), but we still had to provide 24/7 cover. I have sacrificed youth, time, money, health and family to the NHS. My mother is so well trained in my priorities that she phoned me to say "I'm sorry to say that your grandma died unexpectedly this morning, but it's okay, I told everyone we couldn't have the funeral until after your nights finish."
I can almost hear some of you thinking "So what? Why does she think she's so special?". That's the thing. I'm not. In the world I inhabit, this is the norm. And people wonder why we like whinging.
I finished my first year in medical school, then decided to take a year out and rethink, and take an arts A level. I now have the choice of a place at Cambridge to read an arts subject or returning to medicine. I always wanted to "make a difference" in the world and have an intellectually stimulating job, while being reasonably paid, but now I realise medicine is not the only way to make a difference. At the medical school stage, I don't find it anything like as intellectually stimulating as school, either. I guess I don't have a "vocation" as such; I just wanted to do something rewarding. But, as a girl, I don't think I'll want to work unreasonable hours all my life. I was always told that it's tough while you're a junior, but fine once you become a consultant. Having time to live is important to me. I don't think this MTAS thing will still be around when I graduate, so I don't know if I should take it into account.
I don't know what to do. I am planning to do some doctor-shadowing in a hospital over the summer, to try to talk to some doctors in the specialty (paediatrics) that I was interested in when I was applying for medical school. Even if I don't go on with medicine, I don't want to do the typical high-earning stuff like investment banking, corporate law, accountancy, management consultancy... I want to make a difference.
Any thoughts?
Zug, a medical degree will be an interesting and challenging time and will open many more doors to worthy or useful careers. The oxbridge degree will probably equal the medical degree terms of intellectual stimulation, but in a more laid back and thoughtful environment.
The medical degree will center around an ultimate goal, to be a good doctor. The oxbridge degree will be more open ended, more ethereal if you like. It really depends on what you prefer. Either will be good. If you ask a few doctors they will probably say so the oxbridge degree. If you ask a few graduates they will probably think wistfully of the opportunity they had to study medicine and become a qualified doctor, but missed the opportunity because they got sucked into the career/marriage/children vortex.
Think sensibly and intelligently about what is best for YOU!
If you're still stuck, there are one or two well renowned careers councelling companies that go deep into the personality testing realm, if you believe in that sort of thing.
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