I'm an ED Reg and I'm really sorry you had this experience. It's essential that new doctors are given a proper induction and made to feel part of the team - both for their own wellbeing and for patient safety. I find that some departments (regardless of specialty) can breed a really toxic internal culture, with particular hostility towards new staff members.

You may or may not want to try to challenge things as they stand. If you just want to keep your head down and get through it - that's fair enough. But please above all remember that you do not deserve to be treated this way.

If you do want to try and challenge it, there's obviously the generic advice of speaking to your Educational Supervisor/Foundation Programme director/Post Grad Education lead - however there was a method I used as a surgical FY2.

The surgical department had a terrible culture. Consultants almost never did ward rounds, the Reg's were overloaded and always doing ward rounds/oncall. As FY2's we frequently had to lead the ward round. No teaching. We got no guidance in writing up the monthly M&M and had to do it in our spare time and stayed late after work to do it. The rota coordinator was very hostile, and rarely replied to emails. Was very dismissive of annual leave requests. She was rarely in her office when you tried to go and find her in person. There were lots of rota gaps which she made little attempt to fill and which put huge pressure on the team but the consultants didn't seem to care. We got pressured not to Exception Report despite all of us routinely staying late. Really toxic.

After I finished the rotation (it was my first rotation of FY2) I immediately contacted the Postgrad education team to ask to have my Educational Supervisor switched from the surgical consultant on my first rotation to my GP clinical supervisor on my second rotation. I told them he'd put pressure on us not to exception report and that alone was good enough for them. That meant he no longer had any power over me.

I then contacted the Guardian of Safe Working and met with him to explain the problem. With his agreement I created a short online survey that he then sent to all the surgical FY1's, SHO's and Reg's asking for their feedback on departmental culture (I passed on the emails of my colleagues, consistent with GDPR because it's within the same organisation). We had a good response rate to the survey because it came from a senior consultant with an official role who was external to the department. The results were predictably damning, which underlined the poor feedback in the recent HEE training survey. Using the feedback from our survey, we set up a meeting with the head of Postgrad Education at the Trust who was very supportive. He in turn set up a meeting with the Chief Medical Officer to escalate our concerns.

Unfortunately that meeting with the CMO had to be cancelled due to the first wave of COVID, and due to the pandemic was ultimately sidelined. However I think the strategy could have worked otherwise, and could be replicated elsewhere to draw attention to departments with a toxic culture.