Valuing the workforce who value their patients

Editor – when I read your article in the last issue of Future Hospital Journal, I thought that at last someone had recognised why recently qualified doctors so often these days find their first appointment disillusioning.¹ As you recognise, these admirable young men and women do their best to fulfil their idealised role, and it is not the long hours, heavy responsibilities and relatively low pay that they resent, but the fact that no one appears to care for them as they did for us when we were residents; making sure we did not miss our meals by turning up late (food is a good substitute for sleep), sympathising when – with the best will in the world – we got things wrong (according to our seniors), teaching us the knowhow that complements the knowledge that was all brought to our work (we learned this from the nurses) and providing us with the opportunities we needed to discuss our lonely anxieties with our fellow residents (often one of the self-appointed tasks of the now defunct ward cleaners and orderlies).

Administrators who have never been in our situation themselves have taken away the residents’ dining rooms, replaced loyal ward cleaners with itinerant gangs, abolished the facilities for snacking that we used to have and gave us a kind of second wind in the small hours and generally treated us not as midshipmen but as conscripted seamen. We were taught to value others as we do ourselves; we learn by bitter experience that it is difficult to value others if we are not valued ourselves by those in authority who sometimes appear to believe that we owe loyalty to them and their preoccupation with making ends meet more than to our patients with their importunities.