Vocation won’t prevent the impending workforce crisis

Dear Editor,

Morgan questions whether vocation in medicine is dead (1). In my experience as a junior doctor, the term vocation when applied to medicine, only seems to be used when arguing why doctors should accept their current working conditions despite evidence from GMC surveys indicating that this is threatening trainee health and wellbeing (2).

Perhaps medicine was viewed as a vocation by an older generation of doctors who largely came from privileged backgrounds, benefitted from lower training costs, and worked gruelling shift patterns rendering the possibility of achieving a work/life balance almost impossible.

In recent years, the costs associated with medical training have exponentially increased. From university tuition fees, GMC registration, fees for mandatory exams, courses and portfolios required for career progression, these all add to the financial burden of being a junior doctor. With diversification of the profession, not everyone has the luxury of easily absorbing these costs upfront. When combined with increasing levels of burnout from trying to provide a standard of care in an understaffed, under-resourced and underfunded system, it is not surprising that attitudes have shifted towards viewing medicine as a highly skilled job which deserves proper renumeration rather than “a calling” requiring total dedication no matter the circumstances.

In my current role as a clinical teaching fellow, several of our medical students have picked up on the widespread dissatisfaction among junior doctors with many expressing that they have researched alternative careers or looked at jobs abroad post-graduation. The government may think that increasing medical student places is one solution to the NHS workforce crisis, but vocation or not, medicine in the UK cannot continue to demand sacrifices from its doctors if it hopes to retain them in the future.

References
1. Morgan M. Matt Morgan: Is medicine no longer a vocation? BMJ 2023; 381 :p974 doi:10.1136/bmj.p974
2. General Medical Council. National training survey 2021: results. Jul 2021. https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/national-training-survey-result….