Search

The popular show Your Life in Their Hands follows some foundation trainees at work and at home and has been much discussed by colleagues. Having heard negative comments from seniors about the show, I wondered whether exposing yourself to the media when you are very junior is dangerous. What makes good television probably isn’t best for the junior and might not show the rest of us in a great light. It has become almost impossible for those of us who watch television to avoid the ubiquitous reality show. Our appetite must be insatiable, for they seem to crop up more and more. Between fat clubbing, grand designing, and master chef-ing, you might have thought there was little space on the airwaves for a new band of brave, fresh faced young people armed with stethoscopes. Alas, some newly qualified foundation trainees have found their way on to the BBC in the second series of Your Life in Their Hands , their minds bursting with incorrect drug doses and an eagerness to prescribe them. In the days after the initial episodes I was struck by how many colleagues and friends brought the programme up in conversation …

As a junior critical care doctor working in a district general hospital, I’ve occasionally been asked to transport a sick patient. Whether it’s from the intensive care unit to radiology, the emergency department to theatre, or the unsettling inter-hospital transfer, it can be a hair raising prospect. Up to this point I’d accomplished a few transfer missions with little more training than a few words of advice (“Keep them paralysed and they won’t pull out the tube”). Now I thought that it was time to learn how to do it properly. It’s for anyone potentially involved in transfers, so the critical care realm was well represented. My group consisted mainly of emergency department doctors, who often take unwell patients to …