40. First Day Working in Hornsby Ku-Ging-Gai Hospital

So, at last the waiting was over and I was no longer going to be an unemployed traveller. I was about to join the Australian, tax-paying, work force and although slightly apprehensive, I was really looking forward to getting back into the swing of working. I had phoned the hospital the day before to ask when I was expected to turn up but nobody seemed to know anything. The end result was a receptionist telling me “Just turn up at 8am,” and that appeared to be the end of it.

My alarm went off at 6am and that would have normally pissed me off but in Australia everyone seems to be up at that time. Also the sun was shining again and we had gotten used to the early-to-bed early-to-rise attitude since arriving anyway so it didn’t seem like too much of an issue to get out of my pit.

By 7am I was on the train heading to Hornsby. It’s about 30 minutes on the train but there is a 20 minute walk to the hospital once you reach Hornsby Station so I thought it wise to be a bit early. I didn’t want to cycle as I wasn’t sure about where I could leave it and what the changing rooms would be like (if they did in fact exist). It appeared that nobody cared that I was early since there was no consultant around and no other staff that were interested in showing me the ropes. So I did what any other good doctor would do – I went straight to the staff room and helped myself to some coffee.

Eventually, the consultant appeared and gave us a few moments chat about how the place was run and a couple of pointers on the computer systems, followed by a small tour of the department. I then got wind of an induction session that was happening at 11am so headed off to that with some of the other new-starts. As I’d not had a permanent address until a few days earlier, I’d not received any information regarding the job. Therefore I spent most of the morning following everyone else around since they seemed to know what was going on.

Induction was the same as any other hospital and mainly focused on pay, sick leave, passwords and on-call patterns. However, there were things that I’d never heard of like salary packaging and ADO’s (additional days off). Not only that but when I got the a copy of the rota it showed that I was working from 2pm till midnight for the next 4 days and when I started taking details from patients I realised that the names of all the drugs were different.

Australians tend to use the trade names for drugs and not the generic names. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem but most of the trade names in Australia differed from those in the UK. Can you imagine spending 5 years at university learning about medicines then you spend 5 years prescribing them when all of a sudden the entire formulary is changed to drugs you’ve never heard of? That made for some interesting conversations with the patients.

Once old lady was telling me her cardiac medicines and I kept asking her to repeat them and spell them since I didn’t know what they were. Eventually, she said, “What do you mean you’ve never heard of Cardor?” and I said that Carte d’Or was a make of ice-cream back home and apologised for my lack of Australian drug knowledge.

On the plus side everyone in the Emergency Dept was amazingly friendly including the patients. The lay out was very similar to Accident and Emergency departments I’d worked for in the UK and apart from a few nuances the day to day tasks were identical. It didn’t take long to get into the swing of things and when I looked at my watch it was already approaching midnight.

I couldn’t recall having a single break that day as I walked back to the train station. I’d been in the hospital for 16 hours and was thankful that I could have a long lie in the morning since I wasn’t due back in till 2pm. As I reached the station, I saw a train on the tracks and so sprinted towards the platform. When I got there it looked like a ghost train as there was nobody else around. Eventually a solitary character came out of one of the carriages and called over to me, “There’s no more trains tonight mate.” It was one of the train guards. Apparently there had been bush fires further up the line and the trains had been stopped.

This meant that they were running buses instead and I spent the next 30 minutes waiting for a bus back home which thankfully turned up just before 1am. It took another 45 minutes to get home and this made me resolute that I should be using my bike to commute. All in all it wasn’t a bad first day but it was incredibly long and I was looking forward to the predictability of my 10 hour shifts for the next 12 months.