“That’s a very difficult thing to have to deal with – when you don’t think you can deliver the care you would want your parents or your relatives to receive.”
“I know that the NHS is under huge financial pressure, it’s having to find efficiency savings and there are situations where I don’t feel we have enough resources to do our job properly.”
“On a day to day basis I see teams working without enough doctors, without enough nurses, without sufficient space.”
“The most pressing thing for junior doctors is rota gaps. We have a shortage of junior doctors and quite often there will be a situation where we can’t fill the slots in the rotas and then you’re working with two or three colleagues when actually there should be five colleagues on a ward. That invariably leads to you finishing late and also decreases the quality of care we are able to give because we can only see one patient at a time. It decreases the quality of the training we receive because we have to focus on only one aspect and it leaves little time for training and education for us.”
“A good day is when we’ve got a full team, we’re able to deliver timely effective patient care, and there is time for training and we pull together as a team. The difficulties are when there are less resources than there should be and we’re stressed and stretched and we’re not doing our best for patients.