I'm sure it's way saner! Jealous!
Love to hear more about your job/lifestyle.
Well, saner – perhaps. We have a lot of the same problems:
A leaked email from a Christchurch Public Hospital senior manager has highlighted major concerns over resources at the Emergency Department....
www.chrislynchmedia.com
Overall, it is indeed full of people – ODs, cow and eScooter trauma, old folks unable to safely be at home, and everyone whose back pain is unbearable. For most of the few years I've been here, it's been a pretty smoothly running department – we'd clear the WR when we got 240 a day, but now we're up to 340 - 370 a day, going as well as you could imagine.
But, just culturally, it's a lot more pleasant for working. Most folk are simply grateful for the time we spend trying to fix their issues. For the most part, our struggles are highlighted in the news enough they know it's not staff to blame for their waits or inability to access care – it's the administrators/government. So, most folks are quite patient with us, and it definitely goes a long way to have patients with realistic expectations for pace of care and the scope of care provided.
As far as work environment, I'm fairly lucky to be at the newest hospital in New Zealand, a major expansion of the only tertiary specialty care center on the South Island. One of the most fun things about working here is I've got colleagues trained all over the globe – Singapore, South Africa, the various bits of the British Isles, and the locals from AUS/NZ. The least fun thing, by far, is probably the derelict IT systems – I guess we'll see what we're able to improve with this next round of investment, but I still write orders on paper ...
I'd say the one thing most folks "complain" about the most down here is salary. I took a quick look back at my last 16 weeks or so, and seems like I cleared about $75k for 250 hours of clinical work. There's also expectation to do part of a day's worth of work as a hospital administrative portfolio. If you think about it as a part-time academic job, in a way, it works out OK – and factoring the perks of 9-odd weeks worth of time off (that accumulates faster than I can actually take it)(can get paid out in cash if you want, instead) – it ends up being overall sustainable.
Oh, and specialists (FACEM - their ABEM equivalent) don't work night shifts.
