Was editorial written in interests of junior doctors?

Published 10 September 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1587
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1587

Letters

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

I note that for the editorial decrying the reduction in juniordoctors’ hours to 48 a week¹:

All the authors were senior doctors
Shift work, includinga series of nights, is common in manywalks of life, includingnursing, and has been a fact for juniordoctors in emergencydepartments for years
On-call work is work and a powerfullearning experience as senioradvice is often not nearby
Trainingwould be better and need less on the job experience—thatis, longer hours—if formal tuition were better, tutorswere better educated, and tutorials better prepared
The authors’objections seem to be more about loss ofcontrol over theirjunior staff than about continuity
Their desire to exemptjunior doctors from the European WorkingTime Directive is onestep behind "sign this exemption formor you don’t getthe job" and redolent of the old attitude"if you don’tlike the . . . [Full text of this article]