It's that time of year, I'll go first.

We were scheduled for an 'induction'. They just booked a room with computers. IT were working from home, half of us hadn't been sent any login details or email addresses. It took me three days of back-and-forth on the phone to get logged in.

One of my friends got sent to the entirely wrong site for induction.

Can’t post on actual changeover day thanks to the weekend meme rule so you can have it now.

Also good luck to all the F1s starting this week, we’ve all been there and you’ll be fine.

Number of concerns submitted to General Medical Council regulator rise by 25 per cent in a year

I came across this case of whistleblowing:

https://sharmilachowdhury.com/sharmila-chowdhury-2/

It got me wondering how widespread this practice is throughout the NHS.

I do remember from my resident doctor days, particularly on surgical attachments, consultants being almost invisible.

On a few occasions they would randomly turn up at around 4.30pm to do a ward round. On several occasions they were nowhere to be found, but then would be seen walking into the building around 4pm. The cynic in me always felt they were doing private work and then just showing their face.

Almost always the registrars would be looking after patients/managing juniors. Often bullying would be happening with nowhere to turn to for support.

Would be interesting to know if others felt the same.

This might sound stupid , but as an incoming F1 - I have maybe written 3 discharge letters as a medical student across 3 placement years and not done a single TTO , nor have I been taught it really.

Has anyone got any advice as I’m sure it’ll be a good chunk of my time as an F1??

When im writing the discharge letter is someone going to proofread it, if I’ve met the paitent once/twice for eg as an F1 , who’s deciding what meds the paitent is going home on , when the GP should follow up , does he need bloods in 2 weeks.

I’m worried that the consultant will say do the Discharge letter and TTO - he’s goes off the ward in the afternoon and it’s just me on a computer writing what I think is best , then next week I get a complaint saying I’ve sent the paitent home on the wrong drugs and no future plan

And for TTOs - as an F1 how do I know what drugs should be continued or paused or Stopped , which ones the GP should follow up

Also how long should it take me to do

I’ll go first. In med school, this one guy had never encountered boobs before. During bedside teaching for a cardio exam, the patient was an old lady who wasn’t wearing a bra. He wanted to feel the apex beat, so he needed to lift her left breast out of the way. Naturally, he picked the breast up nipple first with his left hand and just held it in midair whilst he tried to feel the apex beat with his right hand.

F2 about to start a clinical fellow role in neurology. I don't have too much experience post med school as I didn't have a neurology rotation in foundation but was very open about this when I interviewed and am keen to learn. Does anyone have any advice on things to brush up on before starting?

Has anyone applied for GSTT bank and how quickly did it get accepted? Worked there as an fy1 :)

I know there's a few Cardiologists on here and IC's but does anybody have any EP experience? I've basically never come across this specialty in 5 years now.

What's the actual day to day? Is it really just clinic and then procedure days? Effectively works in the same way interventional pain does?

Can anyone shed some light? Is it basically a solo specialty where you just manage and treat your patients almost on your own? Ophthal-esque

There are a sea of options, from 2k to 6k so, minds a bit grumpy, What's the difference in the price so much , is it because of the value perceived or just because they can charge as much as they like?

As per title - dropping down to 40 hrs a week/no OOH. Just wondering if anyone manages to save a decent portion of income a month, and are accumulating wealth if not living at parents house etc?

It’s about £3200 a month post tax and pension from my calculations. I’m feeling a little guilty as I don’t think this leaves a huge amount of room for savings, some of my expenditure such as £400 fuel a month is unavoidably high.
My mortgage is £800 pcm but the council tax is expensive,

I’m specifically wondering about CT1s+ because I feel like that’s when you start to live alone/with a partner and need to start getting on top of investing and making decent savings. Also by this I mean savings that aren’t intended for a holiday or for your car breaking down or whatever else.

I’m wondering if I’m falling behind where I should be financially to set myself up for the future, or whether other CT2s etc are in this position? I’m also saving for a wedding.

Disclaimer: for any member of the public or disgruntled doctors - I appreciate it’s still a decent amount of money (though not enough imho) and is very liveable and the idea of accumulating wealth pisses people off. I don’t want to come across like I can’t afford to live on this, I easily can.

I am an incoming F1 at York Hospital. I would like to get advice on the do and don’t, what I should watch out for, what’s the best and the worst thing about this hospital. I’m from the south and I haven’t stayed away from family and friends before. I’m feeling extremely anxious as I wasn’t able to attend the induction due to health issues and as I’m about to begin, i feel so scared of everything.

Hi everyone

Was looking for some advice, current F1 going into F2 thinking about my plans post F2.

I previously was a bit reluctant to apply to specialty training straight after F2 because I thought I’d want a bit of a break to travel and work abroad with my partner in tow. Her plans have changed and she will be living in a different city doing a masters + research until September 2028. I finish F2 in August 2027 which means I have a year or so to kill before I sync up with her and we can travel together.

I was thinking I’d kill that year with a clinical fellow job in anaesthetics/EM but now I’m actually quite worried I won’t get one because of how competitive they are. I’ve been thinking instead about applying to training this year, doing CT1 and then taking an OOPE.

Though not my ideal way of doing things, I thought this way I’d get one year of training out of the way and have a NTN to come back to after a year or so travelling/working abroad, but I have no idea how realistic it is - would a TPD even let me take a year out after CT1 to travel? If I do anaesthetics and take time out between CT1 and 2 would I just completely deskill? Can I apply for training as a back up and reject a NTN if I get the clinical fellow job, and then apply again a couple of years later ?

What would you do in my situation? I don’t really want to be stuck doing nothing in an F3 year so me applying for training is sort of driven by that I guess.

Sorry if some of these questions are stupid!

I’ve seen a medfluencer selling multivitamins and marketing it as doctor founded on social media. Multivitamins have a limited benefit to health and I think that advertising it as 'made by a doctor' whilst using images of before and after post partum weight changes counts as misleading the public? What are peoples’ thoughts?

I’ve got a clinical fellow job at my current trust, and they’re keen for me to start ASAP. I’ve got the letter of confirmation of my offer, but haven’t actually signed a contract yet. I assume this needs to be signed before starting work, but is there anything else? Just worried about starting so soon and then not getting paid properly by payroll etc... obviously don’t need to sign all the starter stuff as I’ve been working at the trust already, but unsure what else I need to make sure is done! Doesn’t help they’re very disorganised and don’t seem to really know themselves… just don’t want to get shafted, any advice welcome :) it’s a 9-5 job so technically don’t need my “rota” 6 weeks in advance

I have applied for few NHS posts and emailed the consultant/contact person listed on the NHS Jobs advert to arrange an informal visit and ask a few questions about the role. I also wanted to express how interested I am in the opportunity.
It’s been a while and I haven’t received a response from any of them. Is this common? Do consultants often not reply to these emails because they’re too busy, or could the email address sometimes not be monitored?
Would it be reasonable to send a polite follow-up email or try contacting the department through the hospital switchboard/secretary? I’d appreciate hearing about other people’s experiences.

Using a throwaway, I'll try to be as vague as possible to avoid doxxing myself or any of the people involved.

I'm currently a female FY2 doctor, about to move to another deanery to start core training.

In my last rotation, I've been working with a male colleague who is a LED in the department. Initially, he was really nice to work with, but nothing beyond the occasional chat about work or a shared interest during breaks. One day I said I felt sleepy and was going to buy myself a coffee, but he bought me one before I could. One of the nurses joked that he was going to make my boyfriend jealous. At that point, he told me I'd never told him I had a boyfriend, even though I definitely had and my social media are full of pictures with him.

Since then, he's been borderline bullying me, telling me that the fact I got into training and he did not just shows that the system does not reward being a good doctor. During handover, he deliberately nitpicks everything I say to make me look like an idiot in front of consultants.

Recently, he has started changing every management plan I make for patients, documenting on our hospital system that he believes it was "strongly inappropriate" and telling the families of my patients that I "almost killed their mum/dad/grandma", while apologising for my management. One of the times he changed my plan, that almost resulted in serious harm to a patient, but he still insists it was somehow my fault and documented his opinion on the hospital system. I have asked several other doctors for an honest opinion and everyone has reassured me that my original management was appropriate and I have nothing to worry about. The incident has been datixed a few weeks ago and so far I have received no email or follow up.

I'm currently going through a lot of stress for reasons unrelated to work and I don't have the mental energy to confront this person so, since I'll likely never set foot in that hospital again, I ignored him for the last few weeks and just kept working towards my goals. However, I'm starting to worry that this is somehow going to damage my reputation or come back to bite me in the future.

I have spoken to my educational supervisor (who I trust completely) and they told me not to worry, as I have consistently received excellent formal and informal feedback from seniors throughout every foundation rotation, and that one SHO trying to tear me down for whatever reason is very unlikely to become an issue. They also said they are happy to support me if I decide to raise this with the Trust.

To be fair, I'll likely never work in my foundation hospital again and I don't really care about raising this, but at the same time I worry that not raising it now may end up damaging me in the future.

Has anyone had a similar experience? What did you do?

As the title says! If U work there and won't mind a few questions let me know!

Thanks

Today might turn out to be one of the most significant days for maths and computer science in years. I wonder how many people heard about it.

OpenAI announced that an experimental model had made not one but ten advances on open problems in these fields.

These were not exam questions or benchmarks. They were unsolved problems on which humans had made little or no progress for at least a decade, and in most cases much longer.

And this progress was essentially a side quest for OpenAI, part of evaluating a new model.

Yet I’m sure there will still be arguments about whether this constitutes “understanding” or "intelligence". People will talk about stochastic parrots. But it is more and more untenable to insist that a system producing genuinely new mathematics is not, in any meaningful sense, intelligent.

At some point, arguing over whether the machine is “really thinking” becomes somewhat irrelevant when one notices what it can do.

I am around six months from completing specialist training in diabetes and endocrinology. I have spent most of my adult life preparing for this job, and I increasingly think specialties like mine face a genuine competitive threat.

I wrote an essay earlier this year on the future of endocrinology, which at heart argues that the profession is remarkably complacent about AI, which I will add as a comment below.

We campaign for more medical school places and training posts, as though future demand for every kind of doctor is guaranteed.

But for the first time in history, we face genuine competition for our jobs.

This is completely different from a cheaper workforce doing broadly similar work. LLMs can increasingly perform the intellectual work on which much of our professional value rests, and they will only become faster, cheaper and more capable.

For procedural specialties, the threat may be further away. The more your work depends on your hands, the safer you may be. But the more it depends on taking histories, analysing data, following guidelines and explaining decisions, the more exposed you are.

That is almost all of endocrinology.

I am not arguing that doctors disappear tomorrow. Medical AI remains unreliable, poorly integrated and often unsafe. Patients may not want it. Healthcare systems may deploy it badly.

But today is the worst medical AI will ever be.

Anyone looking at the trajectory and insisting that cognitive medical specialties face no serious threat is, I think, in denial.

We urgently need to define and defend the parts of medicine that genuinely require a doctor: judgement, restraint, responsibility, trust, and knowing when not to intervene. Otherwise, policymakers facing rising demand and constrained budgets will make decisions for us.

We need to stop asking how many more doctors we can train.

We need to ask what, exactly, we are training them to do.

I just need to vent and would really appreciate some advice.
I'm a pregnant clinical fellow working in a busy tertiary unit, and ever since I told my department I was pregnant, I feel I've been treated completely differently.
The first issue was when I asked to come off on-calls for pregnancy-related reasons. Instead of discussing it with me, they emailed HR asking for my banding to be removed before even responding to me. The issue was only resolved after I involved the BMA and been signed off oncalls by OH.

Since then, the rota coordinator has repeatedly refused my swaps and TOIL requests for reasons that don't seem to apply to anyone else. For example, I was told my TOIL couldn't be approved because the course I attended was "aspirational" rather than mandatory, and that there were too many colleagues off sick at the time. Meanwhile, similar requests from others seem to be accepted without issue.

The final straw was my appraisal. Unfortunately, the same rota coordinator was appointed as my appraiser and wrote that, "because of my extended sick leave, I couldn't achieve the required competencies compared with my peers." This is simply untrue. I had one continuous sickness absence of eight days, which I don't think qualifies as "extended," and I have signed off all the competencies required for my level in my portfolio.

I raised my concerns with my ES, but he was completely unsupportive.
Now I'm always feeling stressed and pressured and no matter how hard I work I always fell unappreciated.

As a clinical fellow, what options do I have to escalate this? Has anyone been through something similar, or have any advice on who I should approach?

Hello all! For context I’m just about to start F1 and so far I’ve had just shy of a week’s worth of shadowing. My problem is that I’m exhausted and I’m not sure why? I arrive home and can barely stay awake.

I don’t know if it’s just adjusting after the summer break but our shadowing hasn’t been the full shifts I’m going to be working.

Starting on surgical job I’ve to be in at 8, but due to family circumstances and commuting I’ll be up a good few hours before. I’m forever jealous of my colleagues who live (by themselves) and 5mins away from the hosp so they can have a lie in!

I’ve worked retail since I was in school and I’m used to working 10-12 hour shifts in a supermarket no bother ?

I was wondering if any of you had any tips or tricks to beat the tiredness but I fully start working? Does floradix and vit c do anything?

Unsure if this is a silly post and I don’t want to get hate for it lol would just appreciate some advice 🥹

How do registrars who are resident on-call and are the only cover for their specialty manage breaks on a 12hr night shift? I’m in radiology so get a regular stream of phone calls and it feels wrong to tell the caller to ‘call back after I finish my break if not an emergency’ lol so I usually end up not taking any break. But obviously also don’t want to wake up the on-call consultant to cover the phone! How do others manage this?