Doctors in trouble all year round

Vittoria D'Alessio reports on the social side of a British Psychological Society conference at Strathclyde. Over half of junior hospital doctors are at risk of making errors on the wards because of frayed nerves, with four out of five reporting symptoms of stress and anxiety in their first two months of work. These are the findings of a study presented last week at the conference.

For the study Diane Houston, a lecturer in psychology from the University of Kent, asked 30 medical graduates to complete questionnaires before taking up their first hospital posts and repeated the exercise eight weeks into their hospital term.

She found that more than 80 per cent of subjects reported marked increases of anxiety, insomnia, somatic symptoms, and 54 per cent admitted making more slip-ups than usual in everyday life. Most alarmingly, Dr Houston found that "these errors were significantly related to the reported frequency of errors made in a medical context".

Dr Houston says that cynics have no reason to avoid hospital treatment during the so-called August "killing season" (a term coined to describe the month punctuated by error and disaster that supposedly accompanies a hospital's fresh intake of inexperienced doctors), as performance by stressed junior house officers is below par throughout the year.