So I'm currently on a much appreciated week of annual leave following a 12 day stretch of day shifts, a mixture of normal days (officially 8-5pm but often running over till 6 or 7pm) and long shifts which are 8am-8pm.
Daily ward work has been fairly standard, ward rounds every morning followed by jobs and then pre-clerking in the afternoon. The weekend long shifts leave two FY1 doctors covering wards with a total of about 60 patients plus surgical HDU with 10 of the sickest surgical patients in the hospital. The duty consultant or their registrar goes round to see every patient on the wards in between being in theatre. These are very long ward rounds, and they expect us to know all the patients which is difficult if they're not under our team or our specialty during the week.
Weekends can be quite stressful when it's just one of you looking after a quantity of patients that would normally have at least two or three of you. Quite often the nurses (who dont tolerate the phrase "I'm sorry, I dont have time to that right now" at the best of times) dont understand this. An example from this weekend was when I was taking my time to write up the anti-sickness and analgesic medications for a palliative patient rather than attending to the screaming IV drug abuser (admitted for IV antibiotics for his groin and splenic anscesses) in room 10 demanding more morphine (he had already had a large amount of opiate based pain relief and had been mobile for a cigarette several times already that morning so I wasn't particularly concerned about his pain). I hoped somebody had been escorting him outside for his cigarettes as he had a pink cannula rather fetchingly situated on the side of his shaved head in the absence of any other suitable vein! It's not unusual for them to come back in under the influence of something and end up "completely narked" when also given their regular analgesia.
Surgical patients on the whole seem to be rather a lot more needy than medical patients, and there seems to be higher preponderance of slightly unusual people, the sort that refuse to leave the hospital even though they are by all accounts well and very much surgically fit to go home, or those that try to insist on having further surgery. Personally I can't imagine anything worse than being stuck in the NHS Hotel. It smells. There are sick people everywhere. People vomit nearby on a regular basis. People crap nearby on a regular basis and it smells. If you stay long enough you're guaranteed to get a chest infection or a DVT. The food is inedible. You're not allowed to drink (although I was heartened to find a bottle of sherry next to one of our dying patient's bedsides the other day, with a prescription for 25ml PRN on the drug chart).
However many hours I'm stuck there, it would be so much worse to be a patient.
