In just over a year, the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) comes into full force for junior doctors. The directive will state that it will be illegal for our employers to make us work more than 48 hours each week. As things stand today, we are meant to be working a maximum of 56 hours – at least, in theory.
The general consensus among the junior and senior doctors that I speak to is that the EWTD is a bad thing. It’s a bad thing because it reduces the amount of experience that doctors in training have, it reduces how often we are exposed to and have to deal with a given situation. In the long run, it will lead to consultants being less qualified and less capable than they used to be, and thins will have a damaging effect on patient care.
The other, more pressing reason why the EWTD is a bad thing is because there will be a lack of continuity of care for the patients. In the old days, a patient coming into hospital would be seen by two or three doctors during their hospital stay. The EWTD means that the same patient could be seen by six, seven or more doctors. The said doctors won’t necessarily know all the details about the patient or what their colleagues have said or done, so as a result, things get duplicated or omitted and patient care suffers.
There has been plenty written about the problems implementing the EWTD and there have been calls from many individuals and organisations (including the excellent Remedy UK) for doctors to be made exempt from the EWTD, that is, that we should be working more than 48 hours a week.
I disagree with this.
I take the minority view that the EWTD is actually a good thing and will improve things for doctors and, more importantly, for our patients. Let me try and explain.
First of all, let’s not lose sight of what we are talking about here. At the moment, we are meant to work no more than 56 hours per week, the EWTD makes it illegal for junior doctors to work more than 48 hours every week. Given that the standard working pattern in this country is 9am to 5pm, then we are talking about a reduction from working 7 days a week to working 6 days a week.
Working 6 days a week is plenty of time. Working 6 days a week for nine years (for hospital specialties) is a long enough apprenticeship. (Remember, that all this comes after spending five years at medical school). After working 6 days a week for nine years, I think that doctors would be confident that they could deal with just about anything that their specialty could throw at them.
Working 6 days a week is plenty, PROVIDED THAT YOU ARE BEING TRAINED.
This is the real problem that medical training faces, if you ask me. As a junior doctor working in General Medicine or General Surgery, I spent so little of my time learning useful stuff, it was untrue. The vast majority of my time was taken up with form-filling, chasing results, phlebotomy, re-writing drug charts, cannulation and arranging discharges from hospital. As a proportion of the average working day, the time I spent learning about and trying to understand the management of the patients I was looking after was small. The time I actually spent managing the patients myself and taking decisions was minimal. The consultants were pretty unhelpful (sometimes spectacularly so) when I tried to find ways of improving my training.
The sad fact is that most of the time I was at work, I was learning little that was new. Cutting back on this time won’t make me a worse doctor, provided I still get experience of the important parts of clinical decision making and management.
The surgeons are talking about the cuts in their operating times and the consequent reduction in their experience. This may be true, but this has little to do with the EWTD and much more to do with NHS hospitals trying to save money.
It goes like this. The hospital gets paid by the Primary Care Trust (PCT) for each operation done at the hospital. A senior consultant can do an operation much faster than a junior registrar or SHO. So, in order to make more money, the hospital gets the senior consultants to do the vast majority of the operations. Good for the hospital, good for the patients, bad for the training of junior doctors.
I very rarely see the junior surgical doctors in theatres, but I remember as a medical student, the SHOs and SpRs had their own theatre lists of simple operations. This doesn’t happen anymore and I think the real reason why our surgeons aren’t getting the training they want is nothing to do with the EWTD and everything to do with the bottom line.
The message is simple: we juniors want to have proper training when we are at work. We want to be interpreting CT scans and making decisions based on them (under appropriate supervision, of course), we want to be diagnosing and treating medical emergencies, we don’t want to be filling endless reams of discharge forms and other paperwork.
The continuity of care issue is a tougher nut to crack, in my opinion. It is much better if all the doctors, nurses and paramedical staff know everything about each patient and understand what the plans for that individual are. However, this ideal is very difficult to achieve with the shift system that the EWTD necessitates. I don’t think that going back to the old “the same doctor will be here all the time” system is the way forward.
Let’s not forget the downsides to working very, very long hours.
I’m young enough to have avoided the days when junior doctors started work on Friday morning and didn’t leave until Monday evening, but I’m old enough to have done runs of 15hr and 24hr shifts and let me tell you, they are far from fun.
You can do one or two long shifts and still function quite well, but after five, six or seven on consecutive days, it can become a nightmare. You rarely get chance to eat properly on these shifts and you become ridiculously tired because you’ve hardly had any sleep. What happens is that you become really emotional, really bad-tempered and after a while you get to a point where your brain becomes like mashed potato. You can’t think straight and you find it difficult to summon the energy to even move.
But your pager doesn’t stop going. The patients don’t stop coming in and they all have to be seen and treated because they all need your help. So, I ask you, when you get called to see little Mrs Robertson, the 83 year old lady from a nursing home with multiple medical problems who’s come in because she’s “not eating much” and all your body wants to do is eat something and lie down for a bit; are you really going to pick up the super-added pneumonia that she has on top of her worsening heart failure? Are you? Really?
The worst thing about working really long hours is that you become really resentful. You become resentful of the hospital, resentful of your decision to become a doctor and, worse of all you become resentful towards the patients. You start to feel animosity towards the very people you’re supposed to be helping and that is a really horrible thought situation to be in. You feel awful about yourself for thinking those thoughts, but you can’t stop yourself because, ultimately, what is standing between you and the sleep that you crave are the ill patients you have to look after.
There are huge rafts of evidence that point to the fact that tired doctors make bad decisions and the care of patients suffers. I think the opponents of the EWTD should be very careful what they wish for. Like I say, working six days a week is enough.
I love my job as a junior anaesthetist. Since I left General Medicine, it’s been a breath of fresh air and I’m really enthusiastic and passionate about what I do and about caring for my patients. I think a huge part of the reason for this is the way that anaesthetic training is set up.
In the last ten months, I’ve given over 300 anaesthetics to patients. In that time I have had outstanding support from my seniors, but have been given enough space to get on and do things by myself. The paperwork I have to do is minimal and is to-the-point and useful and most importantly, people leave me alone to get on with my job. There’s no expectation that I should be in four places at the same time.
I’m working a 48-hr EWTD compliant(ish) rota and it means that I don’t go home feeling shattered and pissed-off with my job. I have the time and the inclination to do things outside the workplace and my life is much happier for it. I found myself looking up the route of the median nerve in my anatomy book after work last week, I would never have done that if I had to work more hours. I think all-in-all the training I’m getting in anaesthesia and the free-time that the EWTD allows is making me a better doctor, not a worse one.
I think the other medical specialties should look at the way training in anaesthesia is structured and take a leaf out of that book.
Working 6 days a week is enough.
The general consensus among the junior and senior doctors that I speak to is that the EWTD is a bad thing. It’s a bad thing because it reduces the amount of experience that doctors in training have, it reduces how often we are exposed to and have to deal with a given situation. In the long run, it will lead to consultants being less qualified and less capable than they used to be, and thins will have a damaging effect on patient care.
The other, more pressing reason why the EWTD is a bad thing is because there will be a lack of continuity of care for the patients. In the old days, a patient coming into hospital would be seen by two or three doctors during their hospital stay. The EWTD means that the same patient could be seen by six, seven or more doctors. The said doctors won’t necessarily know all the details about the patient or what their colleagues have said or done, so as a result, things get duplicated or omitted and patient care suffers.
There has been plenty written about the problems implementing the EWTD and there have been calls from many individuals and organisations (including the excellent Remedy UK) for doctors to be made exempt from the EWTD, that is, that we should be working more than 48 hours a week.
I disagree with this.
I take the minority view that the EWTD is actually a good thing and will improve things for doctors and, more importantly, for our patients. Let me try and explain.
First of all, let’s not lose sight of what we are talking about here. At the moment, we are meant to work no more than 56 hours per week, the EWTD makes it illegal for junior doctors to work more than 48 hours every week. Given that the standard working pattern in this country is 9am to 5pm, then we are talking about a reduction from working 7 days a week to working 6 days a week.
Working 6 days a week is plenty of time. Working 6 days a week for nine years (for hospital specialties) is a long enough apprenticeship. (Remember, that all this comes after spending five years at medical school). After working 6 days a week for nine years, I think that doctors would be confident that they could deal with just about anything that their specialty could throw at them.
Working 6 days a week is plenty, PROVIDED THAT YOU ARE BEING TRAINED.
This is the real problem that medical training faces, if you ask me. As a junior doctor working in General Medicine or General Surgery, I spent so little of my time learning useful stuff, it was untrue. The vast majority of my time was taken up with form-filling, chasing results, phlebotomy, re-writing drug charts, cannulation and arranging discharges from hospital. As a proportion of the average working day, the time I spent learning about and trying to understand the management of the patients I was looking after was small. The time I actually spent managing the patients myself and taking decisions was minimal. The consultants were pretty unhelpful (sometimes spectacularly so) when I tried to find ways of improving my training.
The sad fact is that most of the time I was at work, I was learning little that was new. Cutting back on this time won’t make me a worse doctor, provided I still get experience of the important parts of clinical decision making and management.
The surgeons are talking about the cuts in their operating times and the consequent reduction in their experience. This may be true, but this has little to do with the EWTD and much more to do with NHS hospitals trying to save money.
It goes like this. The hospital gets paid by the Primary Care Trust (PCT) for each operation done at the hospital. A senior consultant can do an operation much faster than a junior registrar or SHO. So, in order to make more money, the hospital gets the senior consultants to do the vast majority of the operations. Good for the hospital, good for the patients, bad for the training of junior doctors.
I very rarely see the junior surgical doctors in theatres, but I remember as a medical student, the SHOs and SpRs had their own theatre lists of simple operations. This doesn’t happen anymore and I think the real reason why our surgeons aren’t getting the training they want is nothing to do with the EWTD and everything to do with the bottom line.
The message is simple: we juniors want to have proper training when we are at work. We want to be interpreting CT scans and making decisions based on them (under appropriate supervision, of course), we want to be diagnosing and treating medical emergencies, we don’t want to be filling endless reams of discharge forms and other paperwork.
The continuity of care issue is a tougher nut to crack, in my opinion. It is much better if all the doctors, nurses and paramedical staff know everything about each patient and understand what the plans for that individual are. However, this ideal is very difficult to achieve with the shift system that the EWTD necessitates. I don’t think that going back to the old “the same doctor will be here all the time” system is the way forward.
Let’s not forget the downsides to working very, very long hours.
I’m young enough to have avoided the days when junior doctors started work on Friday morning and didn’t leave until Monday evening, but I’m old enough to have done runs of 15hr and 24hr shifts and let me tell you, they are far from fun.
You can do one or two long shifts and still function quite well, but after five, six or seven on consecutive days, it can become a nightmare. You rarely get chance to eat properly on these shifts and you become ridiculously tired because you’ve hardly had any sleep. What happens is that you become really emotional, really bad-tempered and after a while you get to a point where your brain becomes like mashed potato. You can’t think straight and you find it difficult to summon the energy to even move.
But your pager doesn’t stop going. The patients don’t stop coming in and they all have to be seen and treated because they all need your help. So, I ask you, when you get called to see little Mrs Robertson, the 83 year old lady from a nursing home with multiple medical problems who’s come in because she’s “not eating much” and all your body wants to do is eat something and lie down for a bit; are you really going to pick up the super-added pneumonia that she has on top of her worsening heart failure? Are you? Really?
The worst thing about working really long hours is that you become really resentful. You become resentful of the hospital, resentful of your decision to become a doctor and, worse of all you become resentful towards the patients. You start to feel animosity towards the very people you’re supposed to be helping and that is a really horrible thought situation to be in. You feel awful about yourself for thinking those thoughts, but you can’t stop yourself because, ultimately, what is standing between you and the sleep that you crave are the ill patients you have to look after.
There are huge rafts of evidence that point to the fact that tired doctors make bad decisions and the care of patients suffers. I think the opponents of the EWTD should be very careful what they wish for. Like I say, working six days a week is enough.
I love my job as a junior anaesthetist. Since I left General Medicine, it’s been a breath of fresh air and I’m really enthusiastic and passionate about what I do and about caring for my patients. I think a huge part of the reason for this is the way that anaesthetic training is set up.
In the last ten months, I’ve given over 300 anaesthetics to patients. In that time I have had outstanding support from my seniors, but have been given enough space to get on and do things by myself. The paperwork I have to do is minimal and is to-the-point and useful and most importantly, people leave me alone to get on with my job. There’s no expectation that I should be in four places at the same time.
I’m working a 48-hr EWTD compliant(ish) rota and it means that I don’t go home feeling shattered and pissed-off with my job. I have the time and the inclination to do things outside the workplace and my life is much happier for it. I found myself looking up the route of the median nerve in my anatomy book after work last week, I would never have done that if I had to work more hours. I think all-in-all the training I’m getting in anaesthesia and the free-time that the EWTD allows is making me a better doctor, not a worse one.
I think the other medical specialties should look at the way training in anaesthesia is structured and take a leaf out of that book.
Working 6 days a week is enough.
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