A widely held belief among non-medics is that there’s some degree of choice involved in coming home at 10 p.m. rather than 8 p.m. But really the only choice is whether you fuck over yourself or your patients. The former is annoying, the latter means that people die – so it’s not really a choice at all. The system runs on skeleton staff and, on all but the quietest shifts, relies on the charity of doctors staying beyond their contracted hours to get things done. It would be against everything you stand for to knowingly compromise patient safety, so you don’t – which means you stay late after
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It’s really sad that this is so true in the current NHS. We are exploited because we took an oath to never leave a patient in harms way, hence unable to leave when no one else is there to save the sinking ship. I’ve been told before by someone that I should try to not be an workaholic when I became a doctor, a remark which I lashed out at. To imply that we do it because we’re some sort of sick masochist is the worst insult to this awful condition we have to work in.
