This isn't news to those of us who have worked in the NHS. I hit the wards in 2007 as a junior doc. There has always been a skeleton crew of junior docs covering the wards after 5pm. Part of the problem is that patients are more complex with multiple comorbidities and there's no right solution. Often, I'd be bleeped by nurses to do menial stuff (like write a prescription for pain relief - why hadn't the day team done this?), to replace venflons because the current ones tissued or needed replacement, or to review patients - which could be as simple as a patient having a high bp on one measurement and no subsequent measurements (and when i measure it, it's normal), to moribund patients. The worse situation was to be bleeped to see a patient and the nurse would scarper ("on her break"), so you would rock up to the ward, have no idea of where the patient was, where the notes where, or what was going on. If you then needed to do anything like take bloods, you would waste valuable time looking for where things were kept. This was often a issue more with bank/agency staff who had no clue of anything on the wards. The best nurses would have the notes and obs chart ready for you, tell you everything they knew about the patient, and get everything you might need for bloods as soon as you asked.

It's sad that seven years since I first faced these problems, nothing seems to have changed and anecdotal evidence shows things are worse. The traditional "firm" of old no longer really exists in some specialties. There's no real ownership of patients by junior docs and there is much more of a clock in/clock out mentality. Working as a doctor is no longer a vocation but a job and it's something I feel and experience now.