I regularly see colleagues in tears and hear that the pressure is too much. These strikes are a cry for help
This week, the chair of the General Medical Council offered an extraordinary message of support to doctors. What was striking about this was not its tone, but its content. Nowhere was anything said about how to do our jobs, or how to be better doctors; the message was simple. It asked us to be compassionate and to be kind, to ourselves and to one another.
We will need that compassion. This Christmas period promises to be awful, just as tough in some ways as the worst of Covid, and this is what has moved me to write this.
The writer is an NHS respiratory consultant who works across a number of hospitals.
