RTÉ's Junior Doctors followed four medical graduates through the 80-hour weeks of their intern year at St Vincent's Hospital. Arminta Wallace finds out where they are now
Learning curve? A roller-coaster ride along a banana skin, more like. RTÉ 1's Monday night series Junior Doctors has followed four recently-graduated medical students through their intern year at St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin - and thanks to its four fresh-faced young subjects, plus the labyrinthine chaos of the setting and a savvy camera crew, it has had more drama than a decade of ER.
For the viewer, it was a chance to get up close and personal with the health service - from the other side of the fence. We were right beside Catherine deBlacam as she tried, ashen-faced, to get a line into a patient's arm. We nodded when Paddy Barrett described his first day as an intern as "skydiving". We felt for Sinéad Beirne when, asked to hunt down some X-rays for her consultant, she couldn't even find her way out of the bowels of Vincent's. We jumped every time someone's bleeper went off - which was often - and rubbed our eyes in disbelief as shift followed sleepless shift through an 80-hour average working week. And we marvelled at the disarming frankness of Paul Carroll, with his knack of cutting to the chase, never mind the case. "I'm worried that I'm not going to be a good doctor," he said. "I'm worried that I'm not going to like it. I'm hoping I won't kill anybody."
Well, nobody killed anybody. But what every viewer wanted to know, as the final credits rolled and the interns went out into the wider medical world, was: what happens next? Where are they, and what are they doing? So here, dear reader, is the medical update. Barrett, having just finished flight school after training to be a pilot in San Diego - skydiving, how are you? - is working in an emergency department in Sydney, and will be moving to the heart and lungs unit of the same hospital shortly.
"The biggest difference is I do absolutely minimal paperwork and maximum clinical work; the way it should be," he writes in an e-mail from Down Under. "In a way, intern year teaches you how to survive in the hospital but really doesn't let you build on the knowledge you have gained in the six years of medical school. I feel that I'm now really working as a doctor."
Meanwhile, deBlacam and Carroll are working their way through basic surgical training, which involves four six-month stints in various specialities - orthopaedic, plastic, intensive care and so forth. DeBlacam is currently at St James's in Dublin, Carroll at Waterford Regional Hospital. "The bleeps have increased dramatically," deBlacam reports. "When I was an intern I would phone the senior house officer if I had a query or a problem. Now I'm the one being phoned." This means more responsibility - but as she becomes more experienced, she says she realises hospital life is all about teamwork. "If I have a problem now I just phone my resident. They can call a consultant if they're not comfortable with something - and consultants often ask colleagues to look at things they're not 100 per cent happy with. So there's always somebody to call."
Carroll is glad he chose surgery rather than general medicine. "I don't like all the social issues that go along with medicine," he says. "There's not enough long-term beds; we don't have anywhere to put people who are recovering but who don't need an acute hospital bed any more; all that sort of stuff frustrates me. And families frustrate me as well, saying 'Oh, we couldn't possibly look after them at home'. They just drop their old folks off in A&E and that's the last you hear of them. That really frustrates me."
Beirne, for her part, is training to be a GP. She is currently studying psychiatry - a vital part, she says, of a good GP's tool kit. "You have to be interested in getting to the root of problems," she says. "Somebody might come in with a sore foot, but you realise after talking to them for a while that maybe it's not the sore foot that's the problem. Often there's a lot more going on. You have to be a good listener and you have to be a multi-tasker."
All four junior doctors look back on their intern year with affection. Having cameras present made it memorable - in all kinds of ways. "You'd look for help and people would have run away from the cameras. You'd be going, 'How come this corridor is deserted all of a sudden?'" Beirne recalls. As for Carroll, his doubts and fears are - for the moment at least - behind him. "You spend seven years studying and you're thrown into the cauldron," he says. "When I said I was afraid I wouldn't like it, I was working very, very hard and very long - and I wasn't getting to do much outside the hospital.
"But now I love it. There's nothing else I'd do in the world. No, I could never see myself doing anything else."