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Over the bank holiday weekend hospitals, like many other places, strip down their staff to a few key personnel. Instead of regular review from teams of doctors, the medical and surgical inpatients have just a handful of junior doctors looking after them – many of whom only know the patient's case in outline and many of whom are just a few months out of medical school. Some services such as laboratories and radiology imaging simply shut down. While hospitals operate contingencies to maximise the efficacy of on-call staff, it is often difficult to provide the high standard of care many of us strive for – bad enough over a normal weekend, but things are invariably stretched to breaking point over a bank holiday. While things have improved in recent years, this doctor still feels it's high time that medicine (like disease) switched to a more 24/7 way of working.
Dr Will Watson
Bedford
