In particular the immediate life and death specialities. ED, ICU, Anaesthetics, and Surgery. They put them under EXTREME pressure to see how they perform under stress. Hence the compound 60+% failure rate. We were discussing that aspect and one guy said his father is a Cathay pilot (A real one. He flys passengers, not freight.) and they get tested under extreme pressure to see how they cope with stress. Very similar.
The last couple of specialists I've had dealings with have all been car guys , including one that collects WW11 military units ..
Having met Gary I think it would take something very extreme to rattle him .... they have to be like that as red mist is a killer
Not sure I would fly with someone who has ONLY 20,000 hours under there belt . Prefer the RAF 1940 Battle of Britain Spitfire pilots 18 years old 10 hours of flying time ....and into battle against the Hun.
Lack of real supervision is what I experienced. I was one month into training and was put on the oncall roster, was called in as a patient with one kidney was in acute renal failure due to an obstructing stone and needed a drainage catheter inserted percutaneously to relieve the obstruction. Called my boss whom said, you’ve seen me do it just have a go. It was literally see one, do one, teach one.
No, all went well, he recovered quickly but it took me a few days to recover This was back in the day when I was a registrar at Concord Repat Hospital. All the old veterans were sent there, this particular patient was a WW2 vet, they’d all arrive by Commonwealth car. The WW1 vets were always greeted at the hospital entrance by the Hospital CEO. They were all fantastic patients to treat, full of stories, tough as nails and would never complain. The hospital changed later on and became a general hospital part of the state system, lost all of its character in the process
Not the experience of the people I know. They had a consultant less than 2 minutes away all the time. By 3rd year Reg they virtually never needed to call them. In 1st and 2nd year Reg the Consultant was actually with them all the time. I suppose it is very speciality dependent.
Good to hear, things seemed to have changed. When I did a surgical term, the registrar(quite junior) and myself would do a full days operating list ourselves while the supervising surgeon was playing golf. Those poor public patients
A few years back Neralee was the acting registrar at Westmead (she's very proud of that, still got the pic from the board ) because there were no registrars available. Lucky for her there were no critical cases like in-grown toenails
That's disgraceful. I can only talk about 6 or so hospitals in the ICU, ED, Surgical, and Anaesthetics field and the Reg1 and 2, are under constant supervision, and Reg3 and 4 have the consultants on beeper less than 2 minutes away. HMO1, 2, and 3 are under constant supervision too.
It’s just the way it was done 30 years ago. You either coped with the stress of it all and got on with it or you dropped out and became a GP.
