Life as a Junior Doctor

We believe most of you who are here are either having a burning desire to study medicine or curious and want to have a glimpse on what do doctors do in general. If so, you have come to the right place. All too often, we meet students and people like you who are interested to enter this path but have the slightest idea about being doctor at all.

Not to worry too much on that matter because we were once in your shoes before becoming a doctor. Hence we created this blog in hope to clear the air as we are now part of the club! As the name of the blog suggests, we want you to have a better understanding of junior doctor's life.

This will mostly include our experiences while going through the training, so you will get to know things like what is foundation training and how many hours do doctors work in a day both in Malaysia and the UK as some of us are training in the UK while the rest are doing their training in Malaysia which is called the housemenship (basically the same thing).

Apart from that we are happy to share some of our medical school days so you can roughly figure out your dilemmas such as is medicine a right career for me or is studying medicine difficult. Also, we will be providing some useful tips and tricks to study effectively and survive medical school.

Other than that we will also post contents about things or hobbies that we do during our leisure time from time to time. So technically this blog is not strictly about medicine because we are also human after all and naturally we spend time on other things than medicine. Sorry to disappoint if you are expecting us to wake up, work, read, sleep and repeat the routine for the rest of our lives. 

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

The first thing that I want to clarify is about the term Junior Doctor. Many people seem to be asking What is a Junior Doctor? a lot. Truthfully speaking, most of us are equally confused at first because all the doctors that we have met are called Junior Doctors. Essentially the term refers to qualified doctors who are working while they are doing their postgraduate training. The period starts when the medical students qualified as a doctor after they have graduated.

Besides, the term incorporates the grades of Foundation doctor and Specialty registrar. Having said that, you will be called as a Junior Doctor which is rather a misnomer really until you are a consultant or a GP. For example, even when a doctor have a decade long of experience, they are still considered as "junior doctors" if they have not completed their specialty training to become consultants.

Typically a doctor will remain as a junior doctor for about 5 to 15 years depending on the area and it may be extended further when a doctor takes gap years doing research towards a higher degree, for example as a Doctor of Philosophy. According to British Medical Association, when junior doctors have completed their foundation training but are still doing their specialty training, they are referred as the specialty trainee (ST) or registrar (StR).

Talking about being a specialty training, one of the most common questions that public (at least the ones who have spoken to me) always ask the fresh medical graduates will be "which field do you specialise in when you start working in the hospital?". All of the medical graduates will have to enter the foundation training program in order to obtain their license to practice and further training and exams to specialise in a specific field. The answer often causes people to widen their eyes, raise their eyebrows and in shock before adding "so there are still more studying to do?". Yes.