So, last night I was at a high school awards night, and the guest speaker was a graduate from 2008 who now works as a doctor in the Queensland hospital system.
She explained that she initially studied for a science degree, but after a couple of years swapped to medicine. This means she would have been an intern only about, what?, 5 years ago?
While she is very happy in her job now, she did say that the intern years were the worst - 70 hour weeks I think she said, and so stressed and tired she would cry when she got home. And get this: if she raised her exhaustion at work, the response from senior doctors was the old "well, that's what we had to go through, so suck it up."
That way of thinking has been driving me nuts for decades! I saw it in an unrelated profession in my 20's, and it has offended me ever since. (That's a story for another day.)
It's consistent with a Four Corners story on this problem in 2015 (and in fact, she would have been an intern around then.)
But 5 years later, what sign is there that the problem is being actually addressed?
Here's a report from last year:
Almost half of Queensland's junior doctors working in the public
system are concerned they are so exhausted that they will make a
clinical error, the state's peak doctors association has warned.
The Australian Medical Association Queensland's latest Resident Hospital Health Check
report surveyed almost 900 of the state's junior doctors, of which 46
per cent reported concern about their long working hours burning them
out.
The figure is unchanged from the year before....
Dr Abdeen said junior doctors worked long hours, with some going on call for 120 hours in a row.
"You're
working day shifts, you're on call all night, getting called multiple
times per day, and then going back to work the next day, of course
you're going to be fatigued," Dr Abdeen said.
"All of these factors lead to a person who is going to be burnt out and ultimately prone to mistakes."
Dr
Abdeen said he himself had just recently covered two other doctors on a
single shift, forcing him to do the work of three doctors and treat all
of their patients.
Here's a report from earlier this year:
The Black Dog Institute and UNSW Sydney have published Australian-first research examining the relationship between average working hours and the mental health of junior doctors.
And the results are stark.
A quarter of all junior doctors work unsafe hours, which researchers
found doubles their risk of developing mental health issues and suicidal
ideation.
Associate Professor Samuel Harvey, study co-author and Chief
Psychiatrist at the Black Dog Institute said working long hours has been
an accepted part of the culture of medical training for decades, but
ongoing research is changing perceptions.
‘We’re now starting to understand the human cost behind these excessive workloads,’ he said.
‘Pressure on junior doctors to “earn their stripes” by taking on long
work hours has always been common, but what we now know is that this can
have profound mental health impacts, with concerning implications for
both the individual doctors and our broader health system.’
A cohort of almost 43,000 randomly selected junior doctors in Australia were invited to participate in Beyond Blue’s National Mental Health Survey,
with 12,252 providing data to form the research – the largest and most
up-to-date national figures available on doctors’ mental health
outcomes.
Junior doctors who worked over 55 hours a week were more than twice as
likely to report common mental health disorders and suicide ideation,
compared to those working 40–44 hours per week.
The same results applied regardless of age, gender, level of training,
location, marital status or whether the doctor was trained overseas or
locally, confirming a link between long working hours and poorer mental
health among junior doctors.
So it's pretty clear that the problem is still not being adequately addressed.
I presume it's a combination of inadequate hospital funding, variable intern numbers, and A PERSISTENTLY STUPID ATTITUDE OF [SOME] SENIOR DOCTORS IN HOSPITALS.
Because honestly, if it wasn't for the latter, you should have doctors at every election telling people to vote for governments that will do their utmost to address the problem.
