Responsibility
First calls, deteriorating patients, difficult decisions and the unnerving realisation that someone is now waiting for your answer.
The foundation doctor journal · 2020–2022
Journal of a Junior Doctor
Two years of wards, bleeps, night shifts, first emergencies and growing responsibility - told by someone learning that receiving a medical degree and feeling like a doctor are two very different things.
After the degree was framed
The real learning began on the ward.
This is not a handbook for newly qualified doctors. It is a brutally honest account of what happens when medical school ends and responsibility begins.
I entered foundation training in 2020, during a pandemic, carrying a title that felt far more convincing on paper than it did in practice. Suddenly, the questions were no longer hypothetical, the patients were real and the decisions followed me home.
Across two years, the journal moves through hospital wards, on-call shifts, difficult patients, difficult colleagues, ambition, exhaustion and a liberal amount of dark humour. It is a record of learning to stand my ground while accepting how much I still did not know.
2
Years of foundation training
2020
The first shift begins
2022
Foundation training ends
∞
Bleeps, lessons and identity crises
Read chronologically
Two years of learning on the job.
Start with the uncertain first step, follow both foundation years and finish at the point where the next specialty decision could no longer be avoided.
00
Before the first bleep
Foreword
Medical school is over, the title is official and the real work is about to begin - responsibility, doubt, long nights and all.
Open the foreword I 2020–2021Foundation Year 1
Emergency surgery, neurology, general medicine and the abrupt transition from supervised student to the doctor everyone suddenly expects to know.
Enter Foundation Year One II 2021–2022Foundation Year 2
Greater independence, neurosurgery, geriatrics, harder calls and the growing tension between the career I had planned and the doctor I was becoming.
Enter Foundation Year Two ∞ The end of foundationAfterword
A final look at the first two years in medicine, the certainty that did not survive them and the next chapter waiting beyond the foundation programme.
Read the afterword
Inside the journal
More than ward rounds.
The hospital provides the setting, but the journal is really about what early responsibility, relentless work and uncertain ambition do to the person underneath the scrubs.
Hospital Life
Bleeps, ward rounds, nights, bureaucracy, camaraderie and the black humour that keeps a tired team functioning when very little else does.
Identity
Confidence, ambition, failure, relationships and the uncomfortable work of separating the kind of doctor I wanted to be from the person I thought I had to become.
The degree made me a doctor on paper. The wards taught me what carrying that title actually cost.
The complete journal
Take the journal with you.
Read the full foundation-training story as a single eBook - from the disorientating first days as a newly qualified doctor to the final decision about what came next.
Every purchase also helps support the continued maintenance of The Roving Doctor and the stories still waiting to be written.
$1.99
Digital journal
Foundation training ended. Before the next chapter in medicine, the road called.
Continue into a year beyond hospital walls - through distant countries, unfamiliar landscapes and the search for direction away from the familiar.
Continue with Reflections of a Roving Doctor.The views expressed throughout this journal are personal and reflective. Patient details should remain anonymised in accordance with professional standards.