I Still Don’t Like Psychiatry

I didn’t have a great start to this rotation because I was told 10 days before I started that it was changing from a community to an hospital based post, but the upside was that I didn’t have to do on calls. I was also told that I could do outpatient clinics weekly if I wanted to, and I agreed to do one a week under supervision of a Consultant Psychiatrist.

3 days before these clinics were to start, I received an email informing me that I was now doing two clinics a week. No explanation or apology for the late notice; it was pretty much a ‘For Your Information’ thing. Ofcourse I was not having it, and refused to do the extra clinics because this wasn’t what I’d agreed to, it hadn’t been discussed with me, and it was unprofessional and just plain RUDE that this was being sprung on me like this.

I feel like this just sums up life as a junior doctor because you’re made to feel like a name on a spreadsheet being moved for service provision, without any consideration of the inconvenience or unfairness of it all. I have a life – being a doctor does not define it! It’s very unfair and I think I was absolutely justified in responding with emphasis on my disappointment in the poor communication and how badly it had all been handled. I am a doctor and deserve to be treated like a professional – the infantilisation and how junior doctors are treated in the NHS is really not okay.

So what was the resolution?

I decided to do the extra clinics because they’d already booked patients for them, and it would have been unfair on the patients to have their slots moved. If they hadn’t already booked these appointments, I would have definitely fought it more, but I chose to let it go.

Psychiatry 2 – 0 Tai

If they backtrack and say I have to do oncalls though, it is definitely NO and I’m ready to escalate to the BMA if necessary. Enough is enough!

I’M A CRIMINAL

Okay, slight exaggeration. But I did get fined on a train last week. Long story short? It sucked.

What happened, you ask? Allow me to explain.

I was on the train, you know, minding my own business, when the ticket inspectors turned up and asked to scan my Oyster card. I thought it would just be a quick scan and I could go back to napping, so I was confused when one of them asked me to come over to the side to speak to him.

“Maybe he’s going to tell me off for sleeping,” I thought, as I walked over with him. But nope, it was worse. Apparently his machine showed that I hadn’t tapped my card when I passed the barrier.

This made me even more confused because I was sure I’d tapped it twice, as I had been in a rush, so I did it a second time to make sure it’d gone through. Ever the law abiding citizen, I explained this to the inspector; I even told him where I came on from and where I was going, and apologising profusely, I offered to pay for the journey then and there.

So you can only imagine how taken aback I was when he straight up refused and started accusing me of jumping the barrier. He then went into a spiel about how I should have followed my “friend’s” example and tapped my Oyster card. (He was referring to The Keen One a.k.a. Kenny, as she had gone ahead of me with no problems).

Then he dropped the bomb: I would be receiving an £80 fine. SO UNFAIR.

He refused to budge even though he knew I definitely had money on my Oyster card; he just kept asking me for some ID so that he could write out the fine. It was so embarrassing because the carriage had quite a few people on it, so they were all staring at us. I’m forever making scenes, it seems.

To make things even more humiliating, I didn’t have enough money to pay the fine (the student life struggle is so so peak), so I had to call The Keen One a.k.a. Kenny to help. Shout out to my sis for being a top babe and paying it for me though- on the up side, the fine was reduced because she was able to pay it there, so yay?

Abs, my mother, is totally annoyed on my behalf, and has insisted that I appeal the fine, and I fully intend to. SO UNFAIR.

Really hope none of this will affect my fitness to practise and stuff… does this mean I have a record now? C’est la question.