Dr. Niamh Humphries:

As we were interviewing and talking to hospital doctors, we would have expected them to have been talking about it being a tough job and the difficulties and challenges of delivering care and of being front-line healthcare workers. What actually gets to these doctors, though, is the kind of everyday inefficiencies found in the system, such as having to battle for care for their patients, there not being enough of them to staff the system properly and of there being too much work but insufficient numbers of healthcare workers. Those were the issues people tended to talk about when they spoke to us about their working lives, which is not really the first thing that would strike us when we think about in the context of talking to hospital doctors about their experiences. We would tend to think they would talk about trauma or the difficult situations they face with patients, but instead their responses focused very much on the organisational level, inefficiencies, poorly organised rotas, long working hours and the difficulties of just finding somewhere to take a rest, have food out of hours and sit and sleep while at work. They do not appear to be fully supported to do their jobs.