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Inside Health

Why Become a Doctor? 1. The Golden Age

Inside Health

BBC

Health & Fitness, Science

4.4575 Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2016

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Was there ever a golden age in which to train to be a doctor?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down.

0:23.0

And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Ria Elena.

0:26.9

I'm excited.

0:27.6

You're dead to me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

0:30.9

Listen first on BBC Sounds.

0:33.1

This is a podcast for Radio 4.

0:35.5

But this isn't inside health, but we thought you might be interested in it anyway.

0:40.2

I'm Dr Kevin Fong and in this three-part series called Why Become a Doctor, we'll be talking about the lives of junior doctors.

0:47.6

This, episode one, is all about whether there was a golden age to be a junior.

0:53.2

It's been nearly 20 years since I qualified from medical

0:56.0

school. I'm now a consultant anesthetist at University College London Hospital, but with junior

1:01.7

doctors and the NHS so much in the news, I wanted to try and understand what it's really like

1:07.1

to be a trainee starting on the wards today. Is it easier or harder than it was for past generations?

1:12.6

And was there ever a golden age for doctors in training?

1:16.6

A time when everything was better and everyone was happier.

1:19.6

Over the next three weeks, we'll be talking to junior doctors, past and present,

1:23.6

to try and understand how the profession of medicine, the role of junior doctors

1:28.2

and society's expectations of them have changed, how they deal with life, death and the fear

1:33.7

of making mistakes, and what all of this means for the future of the NHS. But we'll start by

1:39.6

looking into the past. Professor Jane Dacre is president of the Royal College of Physicians and qualified

1:45.3

in 1980. My worst shifts were when I did what we called a four-day weekend. So I'd go in on a

1:52.5

Friday morning. I'd do all day Friday, Friday night, all day Saturday, Saturday night,

...

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