Frustration

Last night I started writing my novel about our year away and the 365 challenge. However I'm mega frustrated as I've written a crappy prologue that took my about 5 hours and it's only 2 pages long. Worse than that is that I've got nothing else to write about since our trip hasn't started yet and I feel in limbo just now waiting for things to happen.

Hopefully the next 9 days will fly by and I'll have so much to write about that I'll run out of room on cyber-space. That will be sweet. I'm hoping that this book will write itself but if it doesn't then maybe you lot out there can write it for me...

...Here is the prologue. Please leave your comments and critisisms so that I can improve on this rubbish.........

Prologue

I’ve left the National Health Service. For a year at least.

The United Kingdom’s NHS was founded on the 5th of July 1948. It was a vision designed to provide health care based on the needs of patients and not on their ability to pay for it; a shining testament to the ethos of Medicine that everyone has the right to health. Your financial situation no longer determined what treatments you had available to you and over the following decades it would become the envy of the international medical community.

Now I want you to think of your favourite material thing in the world. That might be shoes, cars, books, electronics, handbags, whatever. Then I want you to imagine that you are in a shop that sells those items. However, instead of buying the normal one or two, the shop owner tells you that for the rest of your life you can have anything in the shop for free and you can have as many as you want – forever! What would you do? Would you just pick up the latest Ozzy Osbourne CD and leave or would you do a supermarket sweet effort and grab everything you could?

You see that’s the problem when things are free. People don’t just take what they need. We are inherently greedy and will take as much stuff as we can.

The NHS is a bit like that now. It didn’t take me long after graduating from Medical School to realise that the system is abused because it’s free. I had been working for the NHS for 5 years and I got to see first-hand the strain that it was under. People no longer treated the NHS as a privilege.

This upset me. I could see the NHS being pulled in all direction by patients, managers and medical staff. Everyone had their own agenda and the working environment for junior doctors was steadily becoming worse. The pay had increased since the introduction of the Junior Doctors New Deal policies but the European Working Time Directive meant that the number of hours we were allowed to work dropped dramatically to the detriment of our training. Who would you rather have taking out your gall-bladder? Someone who has done it 100 times in the last year or someone who has only done it 10 times because his time is mostly spend picking up the slack on the ward due to the fact that the number of hours he’s allowed to spend in the hospital is greatly reduced? I should also point out that the there is no autonomy in this as there are people employed to check the hours that you are working and make sure you don’t go over your allotted time.

Then there is the business of MMC. Modernising Medical Careers is a crackpot scheme that has been dreamt up to provide with NHS with more consultants. It starts running in 2007. Essentially newly graduated doctors will be fast-tracked towards being a consultant by having to choose their speciality in their second year of doctor-hood then being put on a streamlined course to consultancy. Again, would you like your gallbladder taken out by consultant that is 29 years old and only graduated 7 years ago or a 40 year old consultant that has been applying his trade for almost 20 years?

The reason that I bring MMC up is that doctors who graduated around the same time as me are not catered for by this scheme. We have to be slotted around the new graduates as they get preferential selection and the bottle necks that are appearing are forcing countless numbers of relatively senior doctors to re-think their specialities, their career plans, even their line of work.

Imagine that you work for a bank. You’ve spent 5 years training for your position and worked for them for a further 5 years. Then they tell you that there a new scheme on the cards that will fast track all new starts to managerial positions. They may even become the manager before you. Then they tell you that if you want to hold on to your position you will have to re-apply for it and go through the interview process all over again. Also you have to select a second position in case you don’t get re-hired for the one you are presently doing. Then you get told that you might not be able to work in that particular branch again and that you can only apply for a “region”.

Now, you’ve worked in, say, the George St branch in Edinburgh for years. Your wife also works in Edinburgh and you’ve got kids in school there. However, when you are applying for your region you realise that the form doesn’t have an “Edinburgh” region. It doesn’t have a Lothian region. It doesn’t have an East Coast region. In fact that only region that’s available to you is “Scotland”. You have absolutely no control of where you end up. You could be in Thurso or Oban, away from your friends and family (although that might be a good thing!). What would you do? Would you stay with the bank or go to a different company?

This is the situation that faces all the doctors at my stage. So what did I do? Did I leave the bank or just go with the flow? Well I decided to do something in between in that I was going to take a break. Not from medicine, but from the NHS and the UK.

My girlfriend and I decided to up sticks for year and give MMC a chance to settle in. Our destination was Sydney, Australia. We set the wheels in motion in early January 2006 and within a few weeks I had a job organised in a Sydney hospital starting in January 2007 for 12 months as and Accident and Emergency Registrar.

Over the next few months I became increasingly happy with our decision and in order to share our growing excitement I decided to start a Blog. For those of you who don’t know what a Blog is, well it’s a kind of online diary which is becoming an increasingly popular medium for people to covey their thoughts. One day while writing my Blog I had a random thought that went along the lines of “since we are away for a year, why don’t we try and do 365 new things and stick them on the Blog?” That thought then turned into this book.

I wrote this prologue before I left for Australia and my hope for this book was that it would not only provide the reader with some interesting ideas for what to do when they are abroad, but also to give my colleagues a bit of an insight to how the medical system works in a different country. Anyway I hope that the following pages inspire a couple of you to try some new things and get a bit of a laugh out of doing them.