Dr Chris James
At the age of 18 he did not want to go to medical school. At age 22, after completing a degree in Molecular Biology with Philosophy, he wasn’t ready to leave academia. Research or medicine became the choice he constructed and, with medicine seeming that much more varied, he packed himself off to medical school. His 18-year-old self would have been horrified.
Graduating from St George's University of London in 2013 he found myself gravitating towards the acute specialties - Anaesthesia and Intensive Care in particular. He was fortunate during my foundation training to predominantly work in acute specialties and this cemented his feeling that he had found his career path.
Core training in ACCS Anaesthetics followed, but with the frustrations of working within the NHS becoming too much, he took a year out between CT2&3 to work as a cruise ship doctor. A life as a medic on the high seas leaves many a story to tell but does somewhat limit your anaesthetic aspirations.
On returning to land he dutifully sat his anaesthetic exams, completed my ACCS Anaesthetics Core Training and the natural break this afforded felt a good time to seek to learn more about the temperamental beast that is our glorious, if not troubled, NHS. The National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellowship offers a unique insight into “the other side” of the NHS and so he had little hesitation in submitting my application.
A career as a doctor in the NHS can be complex and we spend years training to tame the chaos we face. In short our clinical lives revolve around understanding. Understanding how things are in health, how things are in illness and how your interventions may play out. Without constantly seeking a greater understanding of the patient in front of you then the complexity involved in clinical practice can be overwhelming, and the outcomes potentially devastating for all involved. Once you learn to live with the chaos of clinical practice it is difficult to then not become curious about the health of the NHS itself.
The NHS evokes so much emotion in those who use it and those who work within it. Dr James views it as a national treasure under vicious attack from those who would see it dismantled for financial gain for the few. Others see it as cumbersome, inefficient and a barrier to real progress both for medicine and more broadly for society. In hearing these arguments from all sides one thing is clear - the NHS itself is no less complex and chaotic than many of the patients it seeks to treat.
For many, working within the NHS ignites a simmering cauldron of frustration that can all to easily boil over into burnout and despair. In finding myself stood at that cauldron he realised that to stay within the NHS, and retain any level of sanity, requires an understanding of how it works and why. Only in understanding the NHS can you have any chance in affecting the change that you believe in. He applied to the clinical fellow scheme in the hope that it will give me the time and opportunity to cultivate that understanding. Where that leads he hasn't worked out yet...
