Dr. Niamh Humphries:

If each junior doctor in Australia works a 40-hour week, the hours are valuable. One has to be very careful about how to ration them. If we have junior hospital doctors doing 100-hour weeks, their time is not considered valuable. The work is unstructured and kind of a dumping ground for what others have not done. It comes back to valuing our doctors and making sure the work they do is the work they need to be doing, not just work that nobody else has picked up on.

In Australia, there was scope at consultant level to specialise a little more than here. That was really interesting. Consultants could drop their clinical hours and take on a leadership or education role. That enabled them to get a lot more job satisfaction because they could craft their job to best suit their skills, experience and interests at a given time. At consultant level, that was really interesting. They would take on a different role that took up 20% of their time and reduce the clinical proportion to 80%. Overall, it still amounts to 100% but the doctors could steer their careers in directions in which they were interested and also reduce their hours or take on a greater role in education coming up to retirement. It just seemed there was less of a one-size-fits-all model in Australia at consultant level. That was really interesting. It was not just a question of adding to their jobs but of focusing their hours and specialising a little more.