Adam Kay was one of our heroes during medical school. A year senior, so always a year ahead and his band the Amateur Transplants with those cool songs! I had completely forgotten about him for years when (through Bookcrossing) I saw this book and put it on my wishlist. Now I bought it for a little game on the forum.
Our system differs a lot from the NHS, but when I started working in Germany about 15 years ago, there were A LOT of similarities as well. Funny that they had to sign a document to opt out of the European Working Time Directive in 2004, when in Germany of 2005 it was considered ridiculous to even have to opt out of reducing work hours to 48 per week - of course you worked much more, what else?! And there was not even a document to opt out.

The part about the sick leave: a friend just told me this story: She is a nurse and has just been operated for breast cancer at the very hospital she works in. After the operation she is told she is going to need radiotherapy as well. She phones her head nurse to tell her the bad news. The head nurse answers right away: So you won't be working any more this month?

Diary card exercise! We had an electronic clocking-in system. Only it automatically signed you out after the hours they wanted to pay no matter when you really left, no untrue: if you ever left earlier, it recorded it, so if you stayed 3 hours longer ever day but left 15min early one day a month you owed the hospital 15min, no kidding.

Conducting her morning clinic in full wedding hair and make-up as she was unable to get a day off for her own wedding... I will never forget the evening in one of my first years of work I had to call in my senior doctor because I couldn't manage a serious bleeding - she came into the theater with her ball robe ("sorry but I can't get out of it without help") or another night when another senior in the middle of the night brought with her her infant in a baby car seat and put it beside the operating table ("sorry, husband out of town, babysitter ill"). Oh yes, and I missed my graduation ceremony where they handed out the M.D. certificates (as I was at work) - now I am wondering: was anyone there? Or just the university guys trying to hand out certificates?

PALS! Two of my favourite complaints from the hospital years: 1) I was admitted as an emergency at 4 a.m. and at 6.30 a.m. I still had not got any breakfast. (BTW: Congrats to the team for improving an emergency to a hotel guest in less than 3 hours.) 2) Does this fucking hospital even employ doctors? I was there for a week, never saw one and was completely treated by nurses! (Reading through the extensive documentation indeed showed no male doctor had ever seen the patient. All of them had been female, so not the real thing.) Funny thing is, they forward these complaints to a doctor who has to write a nice and apologetic answer to every nonsense.

I've heard the beetroot / GI bleeding story from so many colleagues! I always wondered - I was a vegetarian long before I got my degree and have seen beet root in the toilet much earlier than GI bleeding and it looks very different.

A great book! I think I'll buy several copies for colleagues and friends.

sent on to Finland

The book arrived yesterday. Thank you so much, schwester, for your generous bookiversary RABCK. I look forward to reading this book.

Finally I read the book I won several years ago. It turned out to be funny, eye opening, informative. I enjoyed reading it, and surely learned a lot as a person with no experience in any medical profession. I think that the problems like too long working hours and lack of enough personnel and funds is just the same in the Finnish national health system.

Picked from the Alphabet VBB round 26. Enjoy!

Thank you Paulanni! This arrived today, just in time for Easter. I think this one was on my wishlist and I really want to read it. I think I'll read it soon.

Read it immediately. Quite shocking account. I wonder if the Dutch situation is alike.