Making Doctors

The premise of Making Doctors is that the training doctors receive does not prepare them for the job.

I should declare an interest. I am mentioned in the Acknowledgements: “ I am indebted to Christopher Bellew for the generous provision of a room in London to live in for the year’s fieldwork”. In the UK it takes between ten and sixteen years to qualify and Simon Sinclair posits that is when the real training starts; working in hospitals with real patients. On a recent visit to hospital I was attended by a young doctor and a nurse. It seemed to me I was the first patient he had seen and certainly the nurse took more care of him than she did of me. This culminated when he proposed putting staples in my head to close a two inch gash. She asked him nervously if it was something he had done before. He said he had seen the demo. That means he had seen a video on YouTube. Anyway it wasn’t brain surgery and he put in four staples without making the wound worse. He was learning on the job, not least how to interact with a patient.

This applies to many jobs, not all. The BBC for years has been making documentaries about the armed services. They are a useful recruiting tool and good KAPE (keeping army in public eye). Recently it was Warship: Tour of Duty about life on board HMS Queen Elizabeth on her maiden voyage. Now it is Soldier about the training infantry recruits receive at Catterick Barracks on the Yorkshire moors. The callow young men and women on the course (youngest seventeen) will probably be turned into soldiers by the end of the course. I have only watched two episodes. At lunch on Wednesday Andrew Roberts rightly lamented the folly of reducing the British army from 82,000 to 73,000 trained regular soldiers

When I got my first job (It turned out to be my only job for thirty-nine years) in 1976, a colleague younger than me who had been expelled from Stowe and already had five years work experience, helped me a lot. The only useful training I had was my six months in the army, not my university degree. I have twice come across successful architects who found themselves training newly qualified young architects which, while laudable, was a drag on the profitability of their practices. Education is important in some vital respects: literacy, numeracy, oratory. A bit of general knowledge in languages, history, science, geography and religion are the currants in the curriculum cake.