If Paula Radcliffe thought she was exhausted after the Olympic marathon in Greece this summer then she should try working a week as a receiving house officer. It seems that the recently introduced European Working Time Directive has lost something in the translation. Apparently the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker can only work 48 hours per week, but doctors being superhuman can do 56 hours. Despite this new law, my newly qualified colleagues and I are injecting people with morphine at 6 am after working 70-80 hours that week--legally. Paula finished the race in dehydrated delirium--much like I feel at the end of night shift. My new definition of a patient with renal failure is someone who pees less than their preregistration house officer.

According to the unfortunately named "Riddle formula" we still only work an average of 55.99 999 hours per week (average includes a projected 40 years of retirement). However, that's because the calculation only counts the time in which you are touching the floor of an NHS hospital. As a receiving house officer you gallop from your ward to the accident and emergency department rarely making contact with the lino. Also days ending in the letter Y which fall during months containing a vowel are omitted from the calculation. The strange thing is that none of my newly qualified university friends seem to be working any less than those we knew in the previous year, but bizarrely they were on a higher pay band.

The answer is not random monitoring which is too easy to fiddle. No one admits it but they all feel under pressure to say they left promptly at the end of their shift. To say anything else suggests you are inefficient or can't cope with the demands of the job. Surely the only way to be certain what hours a house officer works is to electronically tag them and follow their every move by satellite tracking. We already do that with other misfits in society. This way we can accurately deduct from their salaries the amount of time house officers' waste eating and using the toilet. Any junior standing still for more than 60 seconds could have their tag detonated remotely by management as an "enticement" to others.

Stephen Goldie, pre-registration house officer, Glasgow Royal Infirmary
Email: Stephen_goldie@hotmail.com

studentBMJ 2005;13:1-44 January ISSN 0966-6494

I realise this article is supposed to be humourous, but it seems a shame it contains so many inaccuracies of fact. After all, the intended audience of medical students depend upon esteemed journals such as the sBMJ to educate them about some of these issues.

To begin, a point of accuracy, which unfortunately spoils some of the 'wit' of this piece, is that the formula is the 'Riddell' formula, named after the Junior Doctor who devised it. A small error, but one which highlights the lack of research that has gone into the writing of this article. This formula is concerned primarily with calculating 'prospective cover' and has little to do with how many hours doctors are allowed to work.

The EWTD was not 'recently introduced' - it has applied to most professions (including candlestick makers) for over five years. Junior Doctors in Training fell under this legislation in August 2004.

A Junior Doctor could work up to 58 hours a week under the current EWTD legislation, gradually falling to 48 hours, in line with other professions, over the next five years. It is the New Deal that limits doctors to 56 hours per week and this supercedes the EWTD on this issue.

The Banding system and EWTD are much more complicated than can be summed up in a few flippant paragraphs. Perhaps to aid Dr Goldie's understanding and help educate his collegues you can ask him to write an intelligent and informed article about the EWTD and Pay Banding for Junior Doctors for a future issue of the sBMJ?