All Change

The first Wednesday in October. All Change! Change of course, being the one constant in Surgical Training. On this occasion however, on stepping off the merry-go-round, I was most surprised and relieved to discover that I was not to be starting with a night shift in the hospital that I'd never worked in before - miracles never cease to exist! 

The HR Department however, held little else back in the way of surprises - it was all very much in line with their usual tried and tested protocol. The On-Call rota of nights and weekends had been sent 2 weeks prior to starting, and was obviously incorrect almost every regard. Having finished work in one NHS hospital just 14 hours earlier, and now a continuous full time NHS employee of 8 years vintage, Occupational Health had now suddenly decided to play their usual charade of finding a reason that I was not fit to work in a hospital somewhere on the exhaustive health questionnaire that they had received 2 months previously. Not to be outdone, HR had obviously lost the copy of the DBS Certificate I had sent, and only realised this when I turned up ready to work. IT were also not expecting a new batch of Registrars, and so had failed to set up user names or passwords for the huge variety of computer programs that are required to function in our job (as a side moan; programs that are completely different to the hodgepodge collection used in a hospital just 40 miles down the road!). All of this comedic carry-on has happened in a pretty much identical order of ceremony every time I have rotated jobs. I do remember at first being rather perplexed as a brand new FY1 doctor, that despite baby doctors starting on the same "Black Wednesday" for decades or longer, the people running the induction appeared in a state of utter shock and dismay that a new batch had yet again turned up at the same time of year, officiously expecting to start work!

Still, sat at 08:13 waiting for whoever was running the corporate side of the induction to arrive late, all of the above was very much what I had been expecting. I had only to look forward to the Tax Man applying an emergency tax code at the end of the month to take half of my first wage packet. At last, a flustered lady from HR turned up with a box of standard NHS contracts for us to sign. This was actually quite impressive, as I had worked my first two years in the NHS without realising that I was required to sign a contract. Unfortunately 8 minute later, the lady from HR said that we were done and that the rest of the induction was now online! Someone raised their hand to ask where we should go next, and was told that we probably had departmental inductions or something, but that she wasn't sure.

I mooched off to try and locate the General Surgery Department in a bit of a deflated mood - online inductions may all be very well, but what about the Fire Lecture! Previous inductions have consisted of a whole day of dreary, irrelevant lectures, interspersed only by intermittent coffee breaks when someone forgot to turn up...except of course for the glory that is a Fire Lecture! In my experience, they are run by an ageing 'Fire Officer', who was once a real fireman in a previous life. Apparently they only ever have this fleeting hour-long moment in the spotlight, but boy do they use it to put on a show! First there is a slideshow of horrendous photos of other blackened hospitals ravaged by fire because someone had blocked an exit route, accompanied by plenty of horrific tales of unwatched toasters, irresponsible employees and arsonists. Next comes the finale we have been anticipating - a trip out to the car park to admire a brief fire in a waste paper bin and watch them set off a fire extinguisher!

Instead of this light entertainment, I spent an hour waiting on hold to speak to IT, before finding my way to the library and settling in for a tedious day of 'e-learning' - hour after hour of monotonous clicking through corporate rubbish, presumably produced by lawyers so that when something goes tits up the hospital has proof that you have been "trained" and so they are in no way liable? On dragging myself through more of this rubbish than I thought possible, I received a certificate and a message that I would now have to contact my 'line manager' in order to activate my live access to the previously bemoaned IT systems. Unfortunately, in my time thus far in the NHS, I have yet to establish what a line manager is, much less whether I had a personal one. My new colleagues were in much the same ignorance as to what a line manager is, although we did of course acknowledge that managers definitely existed, quite happy in their offices running a pseudo health system in parallel to the one that actually exists and functions.

Still, induction or no induction, I'm sure that after a few weeks of wandering around lost, I will start to find out where things are and what I'm supposed to do. My only gripe is that this is one of those New Labour PFI Hospitals, which means that there is absolutely nowhere for doctors to keep their coats and bags, make a cup of tea or go to the toilet...