Confessions Of A Junior Doctor shows impact of A&E crisis
- The UK’s youngest doctors are making critical mistakes by being too stretched
- Their difficulties are being shown in a new C4 documentary airing this week
- It shows a baby wrongly being taken off resuscitation and several misdiagnoses
Laura Lambert For The Daily Mail
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Junior doctors have been filmed making potentially life-threatening errors during patient assessments – which they made while ‘under pressure’ to free up hospital beds.
A revealing TV documentary will this week expose the impact that the A+E crisis is having on Britain’s youngest doctors, as they make a series of errors when their hospital in Northampton reaches full capacity and becomes ‘completely stretched’.
Amid ‘terrible’ scenes of corridors lined with trolleys, a 24-year-old junior doctor mistakenly moved a baby with sepsis off the resuscitation ward having incorrectly scored the symptoms.
Sam Pollen, Emily Maile and two of their other colleagues at Northampton General Hospital
The second episode of Channel 4’s fly-on-the-wall series Confessions of a Junior Doctor is likely to reignite debates surrounding the state of Britain’s A+E departments
The second-year doctor, Morgan Sykes, also sent home an elderly patient, named Terrence, who was readmitted days later and ‘blue-lighted’ to Leicester Hospital with a ‘compressed nerve in his spine’.
The 24-year-old doctor told the cameras: ‘You really, really feel the pressure on you, but you don’t want to rush your clinical assessment of someone because that’s when you can make mistakes and that’s when it can be dangerous.
‘It is really there in the back of your mind: “Do I really need to send this person to hospital or can they go home?”
‘You are really aware of the need for beds and the fact that the hospital is full.’
Another junior doctor at Northampton General Hospital, third-year Dan Weston, 26, also appeared to incorrectly diagnose a baby with bronchiolitis, when the infant had an infection more likely to be pneumonia.
The second episode of Channel 4’s fly-on-the-wall series Confessions of a Junior Doctor is likely to reignite debates surrounding the state of Britain’s A+E departments and the pressure on junior doctors.
The new show comes just a few months after shocking photos taken by the BBC inside Blackburn Hospital showed mothers and children on the floor and pensioners being treated on their trolleys by ‘corridor nurses
Tomorrow night’s episode of Confessions of a Junior Doctor, which was filmed at the end of last year
It comes just a few months after shocking photos taken by the BBC inside Blackburn Hospital showed mothers and children on the floor and pensioners being treated on their trolleys by ‘corridor nurses’.
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At the time doctors said they were ‘taking too many risks’ by sending patients home early, and nurses described the conditions as ‘frightening’ and ‘dangerous’.
Tomorrow night’s episode of Confessions of a Junior Doctor, which was filmed at the end of last year, followed Morgan Sykes as she completed a four-month rotation in the A+E department.
At one point in the hour-long documentary, she was forced to do ‘assessments in the corridor’ when there were no beds available for incoming patients.
The hospital was then put on ‘black alert’, and Dr Sykes – who was the youngest doctor in the department – said: ‘You feel completely stretched beyond any limit that is acceptable. It is a horrible, horrible feeling, just feeling you are losing the battle.’
Dr Maile, 26, says there is not enough time to implement all the things she learned during her training
Junior doctors, such as the ones featured in the show, held six one-day strikes in the first four months of last year in protest against plans for a new contract
Shortly before she began her assessment of Terrence, the narrator explained that the doctor was ‘under pressure to see patients quickly and not admit them unless they are acutely unwell’.
Having heard Terrence was suffering from back pain, she attempted to find the source of the pain but concluded that she could not ‘see anything obvious’ and would ‘send him home with painkillers’.
ROW OVER THEIR HOURS
Last year junior doctors staged a series of unprecedented strikes over their weekend pay and overall working conditions.
Their union, the British Medical Association, claimed some were being pushed to the point of exhaustion, making them much more likely to make serious errors, especially if they lack experience.
The dispute has been resolved and the Government has promised to review working hours.
Concerns have also been raised over junior doctors’ training. In the past there was far more opportunity for them to shadow or be supervised by consultants. But consultants in understaffed departments are now just too busy.
In addition, in 2004 EU laws stated that most junior doctors should work no more than 48 hours a week. This resulted in gaps in rotas and junior doctors working fewer shifts with consultants, meaning they gained less experience from them.
However, he was readmitted a few days later after his health had deteriorated. He was found to have a compressed nerve in his spine, and was rushed to Leicester Hospital for treatment.
In another scene that exemplifies the intense pressure that junior doctors are under, Dr Sykes was called to the paediatric resuscitation ward to see ‘a baby with sepsis’.
The narrator explained that she and her registrar had decided together to move the baby to the paediatric unit for observation, before a nurse insisted the baby was ‘too sick’ to leave resuscitation.
It later emerged that Dr Sykes had made an error when scoring the baby’s symptoms, and she said she felt ‘humiliated’ at the mistake.
Footage also showed paramedics queueing up as ambulances were kept outside, and Dr Sykes said she was ‘physically and emotionally exhausted’ by the job.
Junior doctors held six one-day strikes in the first four months of last year in protest against plans for a new contract.
There were further walk-outs planned at the end of last year, but these were called off over fears for patient safety.
New terms and conditions in the junior doctors’ contracts were introduced last October.
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