YOUNG DOCTORS DISPLAY ALL THE WORST TRAITS OF GEN-Z
I really didn’t want to be one of those people who are always griping about the youth. And in fairness, there are clearly some lovely young people about – self-assured, patient, kind, helpful. Like the 17-year-old south London boy who helped fit my daughter’s shoes at Clarks the other day. He bemoaned his own and everyone else’s TikTok clip-length attention spans, blaming the pandemic, and was glad that his job – “I need to pay for my driving lessons!” – took him away from his phone.
Indeed it did: between me and my toddler, the poor lad was running up and down those stairs. My daughter tried at least six pairs before we decided on some neon block-colour high-tops.
But it is hard to be quite as optimistic about the rest of his peer group, especially at the more luxuriously educated, older end of it. We’ve now had years of students’ disgusting antics on campuses, and been inundated by images of rich kids enrolled at Oxbridge, Ivy League and Russell Group universities draping themselves in the insignia of Hezbollah and Hamas and calling for the downfall of the West.
Beyond the campus, we have the junior doctors. Or, excuse me, “resident doctors” as they are now called. Again, a caveat: there are some wonderful, hard-working, self-sacrificing ones, I have no doubt. But the view from here is rather that “resident doctors” channel the darkest tendencies of their generation: the eager choice of sheer greed dressed up as ideology and activism, over and above hard work and doing good.
Their latest strike in the long-running pay dispute has been announced for December 17 to 22. Junior doctors have astonishing reserves of energy for agitating and union politicking. Consultants I’ve spoken to have often remarked on the sea change in attitude: when they were cutting their teeth as juniors in hospitals, they thought nothing of unpaid overtime, being underpaid, and working to the bone. They were hungry for experience, to learn, and knew they’d come up soon enough, with the pay to match. Now, I am told, it’s all about demanding time off and making sure every extra second is compensated.
While there might once have been some argument for a pay rise given the cost of living, especially in London, the country has run out of sympathy for this bunch of entitled have-a-go Arthur Scargills.
They’ve already had big pay increases – if they refuse to call off this latest strike, it will be unforgivably reckless and unprofessional, more reminiscent of a Lord of the Flies-style ganging up than anything you’d expect of adults who had accepted the tenets of modernised versions of the Hippocratic oath.
Staff with time off will now have to cancel Christmas plans to cover for the striking juniors. The worst of it is that flu is raging through Britain, the highest on record for this time of year, with an average of 1,700 patients in hospital during the last week of November.
We are suffering because of energy being poured into the wrong places. Sure, Wes Streeting now has his hands full handling the strike. But perhaps if he’d spent a bit less time opining on matters in the Middle East, and a little more time and, crucially, money, on a well thought-through public information campaign about the flu jab, we would not be in this situation.
It often feels as though after the fuss about Covid vaccines, governments – both Tories and now Labour – have given up and become afraid to so much as mention vaccination lest it set off the populist anti-vaxxers and make vaccine refusal worse. The result? Measles cases are actually rising, which is unforgivable. The Government hectors people about staying trim for their health but fails to encourage them to get life-saving, painless, utterly safe vaccines. It makes no sense.
Clearly, too few people have got the flu jab. People assume it’s only for the elderly. They don’t know how to get it. And there is insufficient information about the flu jab for children, which comes in the form of a nasal spray for those over two and, in certain cases, under two.
The silence around vaccination is a huge missed opportunity. The Covid vaccines saved countless more lives than they harmed and continue to be invaluable as the virus continues to mutate. Where is the push to reassure and encourage people, and inform them of how they can get one? Many people are eligible, but wouldn’t know it unless they did some research.
More generally, vaccination is one of the great wonders – and guarantors – of modern civilisation. More reliance on vaccines and other such wonders of biomedical technology and research would lessen our dependence on people like the junior doctors, and the health service they’re helping to bring to its knees.
2025-12-13T11:35:43Z
