After nearly two and a half months in this new country that has become my working nation, I am humbled in more ways than one. I thought I would be "flying high" in spite of being overworked and tired. Well, to be honest, I AM enjoying myself in my new role. However, I am firmly grounded in Blackpool, and certainly not flying high. Here are some reasons:
Firstly, some issues with my contractual arrangements with the administration of the Victoria Hospital at Blackpool have led to them appointing me as a day-time doctor with no emergency duties. This has freed me up from night and emergency duties, enabling me to be free on Saturdays and Sundays. However, this has also meant that I get paid only my standard salary, with no extra payment for doing calls and emergencies. This is a situation that has caused me some grief as well as some happiness. Let me explain how. The grief is naturally because it means that I will be saving less money for the needs of my family, for my old age and to pursue my hobbies. The happiness lies in enabling me to be free to do things that others who have emergency duties etc. cannot because they are stretched to their limit. Also, when I first arrived here, I did not know how steep my learning curve would be in the NHS. Sadly, I realised this after some weeks. Although I have enough experience to manage routine stuff, my practice in India or in Saudi Arabia had not prepared me for the immense complexity of doing structured medical practice as it is done in the UK under the auspices of the NHS. Shared care between district hospitals and central hospitals is so deeply entrenched and so systematic here, that one feels overwhelmed. Also, the superior care that children receive here means that survival rates of children with chronic, complex disorders is very high, and understanding their management is really difficult.
Sometimes, files of such children can be as thick as eight to ten inches! Going through such files has enabled me to understand how the system works ... and believe me, it does. That, alone, has been more educative than all the medical text books that I have read in the past three decades.
In the balance, therefore, the experience has been very, very satisfying, and I have only now begun to enjoy doing what I am doing.
The second reason has to do with the availability of so many new things around me. I have been shopping here and there, mostly online, and the range of stuff available here has been astonishing. Every business, whether it is a grocery store, a barber, an electronics outlet, or a restaurant, has a website with a lot of interactive capabilities. They will all have a twitter account, a facebook page, an online store, and so on. It is not merely a web-presence that they are seeking, but a full experience for the prospective customer. This, in itself, is so remarkable, because it does become difficult to resist buying something or the other on each of these sites. I have sometimes ended up adding stuff in my cart that I do not need, and it has taken me some resolve to cancel my purchase and exit. On some occasions, though, I have been unable to resist, and the end result is the growing inventory of things in my house, both in my clothes cupboard and in the kitchen, apart from electronic gadgets, utility items, books, and what not.
In the balance, I am really enjoying myself, but I do need to balance my life with saving more money and spending less.
And now, the final reason: finding friends and colleagues from so many different nationalities and walks of life. But more on this in my next entry.
Do respond in the comments section with what you think of this entry. Thank you. If you are unable to comment, do write to me through the shared link on twitter or facebook, or email me on drtaher@gmail.com
Firstly, some issues with my contractual arrangements with the administration of the Victoria Hospital at Blackpool have led to them appointing me as a day-time doctor with no emergency duties. This has freed me up from night and emergency duties, enabling me to be free on Saturdays and Sundays. However, this has also meant that I get paid only my standard salary, with no extra payment for doing calls and emergencies. This is a situation that has caused me some grief as well as some happiness. Let me explain how. The grief is naturally because it means that I will be saving less money for the needs of my family, for my old age and to pursue my hobbies. The happiness lies in enabling me to be free to do things that others who have emergency duties etc. cannot because they are stretched to their limit. Also, when I first arrived here, I did not know how steep my learning curve would be in the NHS. Sadly, I realised this after some weeks. Although I have enough experience to manage routine stuff, my practice in India or in Saudi Arabia had not prepared me for the immense complexity of doing structured medical practice as it is done in the UK under the auspices of the NHS. Shared care between district hospitals and central hospitals is so deeply entrenched and so systematic here, that one feels overwhelmed. Also, the superior care that children receive here means that survival rates of children with chronic, complex disorders is very high, and understanding their management is really difficult.
Sometimes, files of such children can be as thick as eight to ten inches! Going through such files has enabled me to understand how the system works ... and believe me, it does. That, alone, has been more educative than all the medical text books that I have read in the past three decades.
In the balance, therefore, the experience has been very, very satisfying, and I have only now begun to enjoy doing what I am doing.
The second reason has to do with the availability of so many new things around me. I have been shopping here and there, mostly online, and the range of stuff available here has been astonishing. Every business, whether it is a grocery store, a barber, an electronics outlet, or a restaurant, has a website with a lot of interactive capabilities. They will all have a twitter account, a facebook page, an online store, and so on. It is not merely a web-presence that they are seeking, but a full experience for the prospective customer. This, in itself, is so remarkable, because it does become difficult to resist buying something or the other on each of these sites. I have sometimes ended up adding stuff in my cart that I do not need, and it has taken me some resolve to cancel my purchase and exit. On some occasions, though, I have been unable to resist, and the end result is the growing inventory of things in my house, both in my clothes cupboard and in the kitchen, apart from electronic gadgets, utility items, books, and what not.
In the balance, I am really enjoying myself, but I do need to balance my life with saving more money and spending less.
And now, the final reason: finding friends and colleagues from so many different nationalities and walks of life. But more on this in my next entry.
Do respond in the comments section with what you think of this entry. Thank you. If you are unable to comment, do write to me through the shared link on twitter or facebook, or email me on drtaher@gmail.com
It's good to have your perspective on the NHS, and I'm glad it's a positive one! You already know that I think they're lucky to have you - you are not only knowledgeable, you are caring and conscientious, and you think about a problem from all sides - which is a rarity in medical care, at least in my experience in the U.S. (I hasten to add that I love my P.A. here - she may even read this, at some point, but that's not why I add it. She's quite awesome, and more thorough than most of the MDs I've seen over the years.) I hope that your tenure in Blackpool remains mutually beneficial and satisfying for you and your employers and your young patients.
ReplyDeleteHow I wish I could rise in their esteem as fast as you think I can. Currently, I am struggling to get them to do so, as they expect me to have the skills of a new registrar, whereas those are things I left behind more than 2 decades ago. So, well, it is a steep learning curve for me to get good at understanding the system and giving them what they need: they need to trust me to be a safe and efficient doctor. Not a professor. :-(
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