The Young Doctors

October 2, 2015 2:00 PM

The doctors in NHS hospitals all seem so young. Where are the older doctors?

I've been to a handful of hospitals over the past few years and it's struck me that I don't think I've met a hospital doctor older than their late thirties. Why is that?

Obviously, there must be older doctors. But where are they? What are they doing? And, do all the younger doctors become older doctors or is there a point in a doctor's career where employment opportunities diminish?

posted by popcassady to Grab Bag (4 answers total)

Was this as an in-patient or just to see a provider as an out-patient? Don't know about the UK but in the US as an in-patient you are mostly going to see and interact with residents, usually people only a couple years out of med school and thus generally in their mid-late 20s. The attending doc who's nominally in charge might pop in while on rounds, or if something complicated is happening, but otherwise you might not see them much.

If I understand this 2012 General Medical Council report (caution large pdf, see p. 23) properly, it looks like the median age for physicians in the UK is around 39.
posted by Wretch729 at 2:18 PM on October 2, 2015

The older doctors, in my experience, tend to be doing the really specialised stuff (the discipline within a discipline within a discipline, you might think of it as). Such doctors tend to have a certain degree of choice in patients - so you might have X condition but you will only end up in the care of Dr Smith if you have X plus Y.

The only place in general I've seen older doctors is GP practice..
posted by threetwentytwo at 3:31 PM on October 2, 2015

Best answer: The majority of the doctors on our wards are juniors. Our older doctors supervise the teams, run clinics (for more complex stuff), interpret scans and tests, see people who are unconscious in critical care and so on. They do, of course, see patients, but much of the day to day work is carried out by their juniors.
posted by kadia_a at 4:08 PM on October 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: There are more junior doctors than consultants working in hospitals in general, because GP trainees start off as junior doctors in hospitals too, to get experience before they go out into the community. There are far more GPs (and thus GP trainees) than there are hospital consultants, so that's where a lot of them go. It also used to be really common for doctors from India and Pakistan in particular to come over for a few years to work in the NHS and get extra experience, but the government abruptly kicked them all out about ten years ago.

And it's the very junior ones (house officers and SHOs) who you will see on the wards rewriting drug charts and putting cannulas in (because it is not a good use of expensive consultant time to have them doing the scutwork). But you will certainly see consultants - mine do a full ward round five times a week (including sat and sun), they are in outpatient clinics, they do procedure lists, etc etc.
posted by tinkletown at 5:48 PM on October 2, 2015 [1 favorite]