GPs thinking about leaving medicine are warned they’ll end their days in a big yellow skip living off rain water and sympathy.
‘I wanted a career change,’ one GP told us, ‘I was really fed up and burnt out and with 2016 on the way I couldn’t face another year of it. And I was actually thinking about a fresh start.’
But society told him that without medicine he’d become a worthless pariah, mocked and despised by his former colleagues, ridiculed and shunned by his expensively-educated children, not to mention divorced by his partner. He was told his home would be auctioned off and he’d be forced to shelter under a shopping trolley on the edge of town, living off rainwater and road kill whilst wearing a bin-liner hat and sleeping on a barbed wire pillow with nothing but a faded family photo, a half-empty bottle of Frosty Jacks and a dead dog for company, praying for the rain to end, praying for the cold light of a dry-lipped dawn, praying for the silent succour of passers-by, whilst all the time wishing he’d just carried on being a GP.
‘So instead of that, my new year’s resolution for 2016 is to join the gym and finish a bit earlier on Wednesdays,’ says the GP
Dr Kevin Hinkley is a GP in Edinburgh
