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7 Days and 7 nights Bleary eyed, brain malfunctioning, stomach raging in hunger, bleep sounding for the umpteenth time, patients incontinent, dehydrated and nurses sitting on the sidelines talking about the party last night, A and E calling , Cardiac Arrest - ward 79………………….. What would the average person be like after working in a stressful environment for 72 hours with next to no sleep? Most of us would suffer from memory loss, inability to concentrate and mood swings. Our doctors work in these conditions everyday with added peer pressure of knowing the right consultants and working for the right people. Tired doctors are dangerous doctors. Dangerous doctors are also ones who do not stand and say " right, I am tired. I am putting my patient's life at risk, I have got to go and sleep ". This is a two-way scenario. Doctors working in these conditions are likely to be non-caring and careless by virtue of their job, as these are methods for survival. In addition, we have to bare with moody radiographers who consider your chest xray at 3 am in the morning to be a "waste of resources " or the manager who bamboozles you into doing yet another locum for the Trust by threatening you with your career. These are the events that patients have no idea about. This is how the majority of the doctors have to live . To exist one has to be resilient - emotionally and physically. Recently, we have heard of the many mistakes, blunders or incompetence that has cost the lives of so many. How do mistakes occur in our profession? To the public and the media, doctors are merely incompetent. To the doctor, the public has no concept of what it is like to be a doctor. Mistakes are not to be forgiven or covered up but instead one must understand how these occur. There are types of doctors, there is one type who cares for his/her patient and will do anything, there are those to walk through medicine as simply a " job " and do not involve their conscience . There are those who come into medicine for golf and nurses and the worst ones are those who look upon it as a position of power and control. Being a doctor is all about responsibility, you either take responsibility for your patients and yourself or you follow like sheep and go through life by absolving your responsibility to pass exams and gain that gold star job. A doctor must be safe at all times which is a condition of the Hippocratic Oath. Is it possible to be safe when the environment around you is a walking mistake waiting to kill a patient? This environment is the National Health Service where paperwork takes priority to patient care. Oh, the government will spin their little stories and say "we are bringing in nurses from Spain and paying doctors lots of money" to get their election votes. The Truth is that the job on the floor is far from the figment of a journalist's perception of medicine. Unfortunately, the journalist's perception develops the public's opinion because they rely on these uninformed shark like creatures to tell them the news! ( miaaaooooo !!) A journalist is after a readable story. This has nothing to do with the perceptions of the Truth. Juniors are left UNSUPERVISED - end of story - but they don't tell you that in the papers! Why are these injections given accidentally - checking procedures, incompetent doctors or is the senior ignoring the bleep from the junior doctor. As a junior, I was ridden with the sinking feeling many times, not because I am in any way emotionally lax but because I had dying patients that relied on me and I did not know what to do as university had only taught me how to read complex books. I would look up the method of treatment in the loos and then treat the patient after three minutes then keep my fingers crossed . That is no way to practice medicine although many are forced to . It is traumatising emotionally but the medical establishment will state " it is to make hairs grow on your chest and if you cant cope, get out ! " . This is what every junior doctor has to do when their registrar has his bleep switched off in theatre and the consultant had gone to do a boob job at the local private hospital and there is NO- ONE around. To the medical profession, juniors are meant to shut up and work until they drop. A junior doctor shall be seen and not heard. Abuses of junior doctors and scapegoats for mistakes made because seniors are unavailable is very common . No matter how much the Postgraduate Deans will shout, " we take care of our juniors " - this does not happen. Then again all postgraduate deans are prone to lying - a trait probably taught from in conferences by the GMC. For fear of their careers they are forced to do procedures they would otherwise never do. When you are placed in the position where the patients need a drug or treatment urgently - A DOCTOR HAS TO GET ON A DO IT WHEN A PATIENT IS DYING - THERE IS NO CHOICE . In other cases, it pays to be prudent but arrogance is a shortcut to ignoring this safety net. Doctors by education are taught to think they are the top 1%, taught to be arrogant as their peers and most importantly not taught about the ethics of medicine " when in trouble ask ". It usually saves the doctor a dead patient. The attitude therefore of doctors is " hey, I walk around in a white coat and all the nurses love me so I therefore know everything " (even if they do not know everything!). I once knew a gentleman who qualified from Cambridge who gave a patient a lethal dose of diamorphine for abdominal pain from constipation. While in the dinning room of the hospital I overhead two house officers talking. " I played golf with the consultant and buttered him up so they will be no problems with that patient who died last week ". " I signed the crem forms off and the family will have no idea ". He was an old codger though and I would rather that happened than my career go down. Mr X told me that they removed all traces of my prescription. " Cambridge University doctors and I had never got on. Distasteful as some of them were with their hoity toity accents and their smart suits which didn't quite help them out when the patient keeled down on the floor and they shuffled around shouting " call the nurse, call the nurse ". The minor point of the fact that he was a doctor had escaped him! Errors occur by a number of factors, overworking by the National Health Service where a 48-hour week is a 72-hour shift, carelessness, arrogance and most of all the lack of care for the patient. There are many doctors who genuinely care but are overshadowed by the culture of medicine where to get to the top you have to be arrogant, self centred and play the right game of golf with the right people. 98,000 people die of medical errors every year. These are the errors that we know about. Given that it is established that the system is indeed corrupt and riddled with lies, cover-ups at the cost of people's lives and relatives - how do we know that the figure is not considerably more than that. The answer to that question is, medical errors occur more often now than previously because of the system problems, lack of caring doctors and a system set up to protect doctors rather than ensure justice is done. The definition of justice in the National Health Service is a cover-up ! . The question is, how many patients will die, how many graves will be dug and how many families will be left without their father, mother, brothers or sisters or children? In a health service that has disobeyed every known law of medicine, betrayed everything that was expected by Bevan - they are left to rule . Whistleblowers are not protected and the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 should be used as doodling paper as it has no uses in practice . Journalists write for sensationalism not the truth and the government ensure spin stories to obtain votes, position and power. In the meantime, we have the tears of a mother, the suicide of a two elderly individuals in Birmingham for fear that their homes will be taken from them and they will placed in a home, relatives in black - gathered crying around a grave ignorant that a hospital did not find their relative dead for twelve hours , a child who cries to sleep because her mother was taken away, the echoes of cries down the ward corridors as his wife dies his in arms while the doctors walk to the next golf meeting . That is the truth - UNCUT Dr Rita Pal
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