ABSTRACT
Black Wednesday is the popular term referring to the first Wednesday of August when UK trainee doctors rotate jobs and recently graduated medical students set foot on the wards as qualified doctors for the first time. Since a television programme in the 1990s labelled the ensuing period ‘the killing season’, numerous studies have attempted to establish whether hospital admission around the doctor changeover date is associated with increased mortality, with mixed results. The balance of evidence may favour a real effect, yet the aetiology of any increased mortality and excess deaths remains unclear, with numerous systems factors being a more likely culprit than new doctors’ collective inexperience. Bridging the gap between medical student and new doctor depends not on acquiring extra clinical knowledge, but instead on aspects of medicine’s ‘hidden curriculum’. The introduction explains that in attempting to understand these aspects, the book will draw on a range of subjects including psychology, business, anthropology and behavioural economics, areas relating to something we have been long before we were doctors – a human amongst humans.
