I’m planning on going back to work in a few weeks, apparently there’s this pandemic on and the hospital’s short staffed, so “we’ve” brought forward the return to work date to the beginning of November.

I thought I’d tell you a little bit about the realities of life as a junior doctor. It’s not like casualty.

Doctors are at incredibly increased risk of mental health disorders and suicide, everyone’s read stories of drs going off shift never to be seen again.

The sad thing is, this isn’t some one-off tragedy, it’s ENTIRELY predictable.

First of all, medical school. It’s 4-6 years (depending on if you’re a graduate or not at entry) of shite. I’ve studied at every level, BSc, MSc and PhD.

Nothing prepared me for med school.

It’s a tick-box system designed for 18 year olds who have parents who are doctors/lawyers/bankers and can pay for everything.

There is literally nothing in place for anybody who requires even a tiny bit of flexibility for caring, whether for kids, parents, others or themselves

Key highlights included being threatened to be thrown off my course because I didn’t send them an ‘original’ copy of my father’s death certificate to confirm the cause of my absence.

Unfortunately, as he suicided, there had to be a coroners investigation, so that certificate wasn’t issued in the normal way. Cue numerous threats from the administrators about my ‘lack of professionalism’

I could write a MILLION tweets on how awful med school is, but they wouldn’t be funny or interesting, they’d just be sad.

So… ‘junior doctors’ – that would be every doctor that isn’t a consultant or GP. The surgical ST7 who’s been a doctor for a minimum of 10 years and performed your surgery? Junior.

Think of all the protective factors people tell you about to protect your mental and physical health, now strip every single one of them away.

We have zero control where we live in the first two years, we apply for our jobs through a central system similar to UCAS called ‘oriel’ – it assigns us a job, if we don’t take it, we have no job.

We move jobs every four months. Imagine the stress of starting in a new job, learning names, where the printer is, how the place works, who’s a prick….

Now imagine doing that every four months. Whilst caring for sick and often dying people.

Everyone wants to do a good job at work, no matter what they do. I want to sit and listen to patients, I want to hear their stories, but there’s not enough time, there’s NEVER enough time.

So people think doctors give zero fucks, it’s not that at all, it’s just we do not have enough time to do the job we want to do.

Speaking of time… what does ‘full time’ mean to you? Between 35-40 hours/week in terms of contracted hours, right?

I want to work at 80% of full-time hours, know how many hours that is? 40/week. Nights, days and weekends.

Doctors aren’t allowed to work part-time as a rule, we have to apply for 'special circumstances'

Full time hours for me is 48 hours per week. If I work 40/week this is considered PART-TIME. It extends my junior doctor years by another 20%.

We can legally be rotated up to 72 hours in a week. I’ve worked this shift pattern, it’s horrific.

When we push back, we get sent on ‘resilience’ training. I don’t need to be more resilient, I’m already incredibly fucking resilient, I need a work environment which isn’t toxic.

Feedback, it’s super important to know if you're doing a decent job, I get that.

We get to send out a ‘TAB’ (team assessment of behaviour) which is essentially an anonymous bitching form which goes to everyone in the department.

I have a colleague who had an anonymous TAB saying they ‘stole’ milk from the staff fridge.

Remember that ‘move jobs every 4 month’ bit, they simply hadn’t realised there was a tea fund they should have thrown £2 into. Now they have a permanent black mark on their portfolio.

So, in summary, some doctors are cunts, just like some people who work in any industry are cunts.

But there’s a whole heap of hidden shit to our jobs people simply have no idea about.

I still fucking LOVE my job, can't wait to go back to work and feel useful again.

Also, I earn approx. £13/hour. I also have to pay out of my own cash for training, insurance and mandatory exams.

My mate on the Lidl grad scheme who did 3 years at uni and blagged a 2:1 earns nearly double my wage & has a company car. I’m NOT doing it for the cash.