Medicine: another bastion of the UK’s great class divide

Patients come from a range of different backgrounds. Yet, based on my 12 years of studying and working in medicine, I have sadly concluded that the same cannot be said of those who deliver healthcare.

Throughout medical school I felt tremendously out of place, not in terms of the vigour of the curriculum but because of the visible class divide that permeated the year groups. There was always an undertone of classism and, although no one talked about it openly, it was evident from the outset and it came to dictate the friendship groups that eventually formed.

British society is uniquely defined by class, with all its permutations, in a way that can’t be said of many other countries. The divide …