The Doctors mess
Posted on August 7th, 2008 by Rob.
Every hospital has a doctor?s mess. The mess varies greatly from hospital to hospital. As a med student I always thought that it was just a room to sit and drink coffee but now I know it?s so much more. I?ve seen about 10 messes during my 6 years at medical school and they have all been different. The worst was a tiny room with hard chairs and falling to pieces kitchen with dirty cups. My current hospital has the best mess I?ve ever seen. It has loads of room, nice soft sofas, massive TV, sky, play station, pool table, great kitchen and kind of a balcony.
The mess is where you go when you need to take 10. A place to chat to other doctors (about nothing really) or a place to sit and read the days paper. When I got my paperwork before starting work I had to fill in hundreds of forms. One of these forms was an agreement for the HR department to take ?18 from my wages every month for the mess. At the time I thought that was a bit steep, but not anymore. I did a few calculations based on observations. The mess gets a box of fruit delivered daily. I saw it being delivered and I counted the fruit. Based on Tesco prices the yearly fruit bill will be approximately ?4000. As well as fruit the mess is always stocked with tea, coffee, milk, cereal, fresh bread, margarine, daily newspapers, and peanut butter. The expenses must be massive.
After my last post on Tuesday night all the new doctors in the hospital went for a night out at Pizza Express in town. It was agreed that we would order what we wanted and then split the bill equally, however when the time came to pay the bill we were told that the doctors mess had already covered it! Cheers guys.
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Sounds nice. If where you are isn’t so remote, I would be considering going to uni down there!
I look forward to discovering the Doctors Mess in any placements I get to go to. With any luck they’ll be as good as yours now…
Come to think of it, I never even knew hospitals had a place for doctors to go until you mentioned it today. Weird. As a patient you don’t consider what the doctors do when they’re not actually working.
And I’ve now discovered I was justified in my thoughts about not wondering about what the doctors do when they’re not actually working:
Junior doctors are always working…!
That’s really cool. I never put much thought into it and just thought of them having like a staff room and it being very basic. When i was doing work experience the F1s and F2s had their own mess which I spent a few lunch times in. It was ok but stocked no food and seemed to be just second hand chairs a bit like a waiting room in a dental or Gp practice, but with a sink.Thanks for enlightening me though
[...] contributions, student loan re-payments, and payment for the doctors mess (?18 per month – see previous blog posting for explanation). Total deductions work out at about 30% of your gross [...]