Recruiting psychiatrists is indeed a Sisyphean task. Reference Brown, Vassilas and Oakley1 To counter this, the Royal College of Psychiatrists aims to engage more closely with college students. However, there seem to be more fundamental problems which need addressing.
The College wants to ensure that medical students are aware of the advantages of a career in psychiatry. Before we can do that, however, we have to first make careers in psychiatry more attractive. Although the intellectual stimulation and the challenges that psychiatry brings, the working environment, the increasing confusion about the role of psychiatrists, the current state and future of psychiatry, New Ways of Working and the continuous dismissal of psychiatry as a scientific field by the spin doctors and political gurus are areas of concern.
Compared with other fields, such as general practice, providing better and more flexible working environments in psychiatry does not seem to be part of the government's plan for the future of the National Health Service. 2 Most of the agendas that are damaging the reputation of psychiatry and allowing people to question its scientific credentials are politically driven, but senior psychiatrists are also to blame for colluding with politicians and not doing enough to preserve the integrity of the field. Reference Craddock, Antebi, Attenburrow, Bailey, Carson and Cowen3
Training opportunities for junior trainees are being compromised by replacing out-of-hour on-call rotas with other mental health professionals, purely to cut costs. Many trainees are struggling to get decent supervision, while some senior psychiatrists are too busy training nurse prescribers. There is nothing wrong with training other professionals but we need to get our priorities right. While the College and schools of psychiatry encourage higher trainees to get involved in medical education and recruit medical students, and there are many highly enthusiastic trainees willing to do this, the reality is that New Ways of Working and the new training schemes provide very little opportunity and time for the trainees to undertake any such activities.
While we must continue to encourage people to join the most fascinating field of medicine, we also need to get our house in order.
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