‘The wise bustle and laugh as they walk, but fools bustle and are important,’ wrote F.L. Lucas a century ago. ‘And this, probably is all the difference between them.’ The government and the British Medical Association, who yesterday announced that henceforth junior doctors will be called ‘resident doctors’, are bustling and self-important fools.
I was 37 when I ceased being a junior doctor and became a consultant. Not quite the glittering early success of Pitt the Younger, but I had the common comfort of being ordinary and surrounded by peers roughly my age. I search my memory for the awful horrors caused by carrying around the name ‘junior’ all those years, but I search in vain. No mental scars seem apparent.
There is nothing infantilising or demeaning about being a ‘junior doctor’
Nor, now I come to think of it, do I recall a single occasion in which a colleague or a patient was ever confused about my status. I was generally treated with respect, even friendliness, and those who offered indifference or contempt did so because of failings of character – not because that word ‘junior’ had proven a warrant for being treated as somewhat less than a human being.
This, somehow, has not been the view popular amongst those representing my profession with the government, or with the government itself. The BMA has called the term ‘junior’ confusing, adding at no extra charge that it was ‘infantilising and demeaning’.
This is a good example of the mentality of student activism creating a problem where none exist, then successfully pushing for a false solution. Junior doctor committees have long needed to find causes for complaint, and the name ‘junior’ has come up before. People whose elections rests on complaining loudest have succeeded in conjuring up a sense of grievance where none really existed, and the adults in the room have colluded.
‘Resident’, we are told, is a term used in many other countries. Mainly, that means, it’s a term used in US TV dramas, where it applies to the grade between intern and attending doctor – roughly equivalent to the old British term of registrar. In the UK, registrars have long been replaced by a series of newly-titled grades that mean the exact same thing. Fashions have changed, and they are currently known as Foundation Year doctors, Internal Medicine Trainees and Specialty Trainees.
Strange as it may sound, the older terms are still common currency in daily conversation. People have a lingering reluctance to adopt the words they’re told to use when better, ordinary, more accurate ones are already in their mouths. Resident doctors were called that because they stayed resident in hospitals; now, the term is archaic even in America. In Britain the new terminology will be ignored, and the government directive and BMA campaigns will be greeted with indifference, then indifferently ignored, by the bulk of the medical profession.
In changing the terminology for ‘junior doctors’ we are witnessing a denigration of language. Our newly rechristened ‘resident doctors’ are not resident in hospitals, but they are junior, and the new announcement replaces an imperfect but accurate word with one that is dishonest and confusing. The fact that it is familiar to those who watch the glamorous fictions of Grey’s Anatomy explains much but justifies nothing. I suspect that after a brief flurry of insincere efforts from hospital management (who are generally selected for talented insincerity) the word ‘resident’ will be forgotten, and our language will remain undesecrated. But the sense of the BMA and the government as serious organisations, thoughtful about healthcare, will be diminished.
Everything is what it is, and not some other thing. There is nothing infantilising or demeaning about being a ‘junior doctor’, only about falsely calling it something else entirely. ‘The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,’ said the US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In that vein, I suspect the misleading title of resident will lose out in the daily marketplace of hospital conversation.
Junior doctors remain junior compared to consultants, just as Pitt the Younger, born 265 years ago, is still not Pitt the Older. And Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior, a fine doctor in his day, never did hand his suffix over to his son, whose reputation as the finest of Supreme Court justices somehow survived him being called Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior.
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