We’ve Regulated the Joy Out of Medicine. Here’s How We Get It Back

Most of us have been told that the way to protect standards and patient safety is more structure: tighter curricula, exact numbers, rigid pathways, committing to a specialty by 24 and staying on that line to the end. But what if that’s the very thing draining the joy out of being a doctor? What if the rules built to protect standards are quietly lowering them, by burning out capable people and straitjacketing the most able? And what if only a quarter of the recommendations that come out of reviews like this ever actually get done, unless someone deliberately sets out to beat those odds? In this conversation with Dame Jane Dacre, chair of the Medical Education and Training Review, former RCP President and emeritus professor at UCL, we go well beyond the usual “training is broken” conversation.