So let me be open and direct, I have a big chip on my shoulder about the expressed and unexpressed attitudes towards GPs. You felt like a second class citizen if you were a GP trainee. The disrespect was endemic, ingrained and institutionalised. And the GP bashing was as loud and relentless as the artillery at the Somme: ’He failed his MRCP so he had to go into GP’ etc, etc, etc. Dysfunctional with a capital F, the whole system was broken. No one seemed to care much about the patients. The only consolation is that the hospital was disrespectful to everyone, nurses, physiotherapists and of course the idiot orthopaedic surgeons. The whole consultant thing was embarrassingly s ycophantic, just forced laughter, interminable ward rounds, nails-on-blackboard clinical meetings and the consultants went unchallenged.

Many were fantastic, but the negative far outstripped the positive. Then I was a junior doctor in a district general hospital and a large proportion of consultants was pompous, bombastic and absent. Funny how feeling superior is a reflection of immaturity. The guys who scraped through were those generally fending for themselves in horrible flats.Īs a student we had virtually no contact with GPs, there was just relentless sneering and condescension expressed towards general practice. I liked many of these ‘mummies boys’ and ‘daddy’s girls’ high-flyer students, but I certainly did not and do not venerate them. And the guys who did well at university were normally the rich kids who stayed at home and were swots. The bottom line is doctors are clever but not as clever as we think we are. Secondly, doctors have done well academically, but academic ability is not the same as intelligence, wholly and totally confounded by wealth, opportunity, schooling and tutoring. Firstly, let’s dispel the myth that doctors are made of a higher moral fibre than the rest of humanity, they aren’t. I was one of hundreds of medical students, many of whom are now consultants (indeed, some are my best friends). I think about him occasionally on a Friday night as I listen to 80s music and drink lager, it helps me push against my vanity. I lost track of him, last I heard he was working as a labourer.

We met occasionally, an oddity, a mod and a punk, chatting and laughing. At 16 I donned a fishtail Parker, he put on a sleeveless ‘UK Subs’ T-Shirt, tattooed a cross between his eyebrows and dropped out of school. We sat in some of the same classes, burnt custard in home economics, slumped sleeping in RE and slipped like cartoon characters on the muddy park because neither of us could afford football boots in PE.

Broken mods hospital 16