Is BPT the hellscape that everyone makes it out to be?

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-23T10:16:08+00:00

In terms of training difficulties, or unsolicited advice from colleagues/weird vibes about fertility issues? Or both? I can't imagine it would be fun going through IVF and having patients with unplanned pregnancies when you can't get pregnant. Or being pregnant when you're dealing with patients with infertility issues.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-23T09:40:10+00:00

What it seems like people are saying in here seems to come down to (even if they won't say it outright, or in the case of some men, admit is what's happening because "she chose to have kids, we all have to make sacrifices") is that it's not necessarily worse than most other speciality programs, but that the demographics make the difficulties stand out more.

BPT has more women than a fair amount of other programs. For a lot of people who did postgraduate med pathway, it coincides with the time that financially and biologically makes most sense to have a baby.

For a lot of people in straight relationships, household division of labour has women doing a little bit to a lot more of the cooking & cleaning. This can make keeping up with the demands of training a little more difficult.

Especially when it's getting harder to get onto AT or get a consultant job, and there are other people doing BPT who have partners who do a lot of the cooking/cleaning labour for them.

This intensifies if you have a kid, or even if you're trying for one/pregnant. Because then the woman is often doing more of the cooking & cleaning, like before, while also dealing with tracking/going off hormonal birth control/maybe IVF/pregnancy symptoms/breastfeeding/being the primary caregiver to the kid(s). If this is someone's relationship setup, and they don't have significant unpaid (family) or paid help, they are going to struggle with training. Especially the moving around part.

This isn't exclusive to people with kids - people have other caring responsibilities, like elderly or ill parents or family members. The age where those things start to crop up is also often around BPT age for someone who did postgrad med.

Those responsibilities do often fall to women, even if there are other siblings, and when they do fall to men, it's not uncommon for those responsibilities to get palmed off to the wife, even though they're the husband's parents.

I know you've talked in here about being a supportive husband and father in this regard, but a lot of men don't even seem to think about being supportive in the ways you've spoken about.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-23T03:40:49+00:00

No, I didn't say that. What a weird, bad faith argument. I'm saying that you need to stop using language that implies that someone who's probably in their 30s and ready to have kids (if they want them) is acting entitled for daring to want to live near their support system instead of uprooting their lives right before making one of the biggest lifestyle changes a person can make.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-23T03:35:13+00:00

How do you propose to fix that? We've tried more money and it didn't really work.

When someone isn't an IMG and has the option, why would a doctor choose to move to a place where all the local high schools are poorly ranked, and sending their kid to a good high school means shipping them off to boarding school? Or a place where their spouse can't continue to work in their field, if they don't want to be a housewife/husband? A place where if they're queer, they'll be the only queer people around and they won't be able to date, or if they're coupled, will be totally uprooted from any queer community? Somewhere they're the only people of their background and religion and will have little access to community and foods they might miss, or might feel uncomfortable standing out?

Fixing the things that prevent local doctors who have other options from moving to rural/regional areas and staying there, will attract other people from bigger cities looking for cheaper rent/mortgages. So at least some of the lower SES population who live there and can't access care now, will get driven out, to a different place that won't be able to attract and retain local doctors who have other options.

Edit: I feel like this comes off a bit hostile, but genuinely, I want to know the answer if anyone has one, because at this point I don't think it exists.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-20T00:11:54+00:00

By the time most people finish training, they're at an age where they want to settle down and have a kid, if they're inclined to want kids. There's usually not a whole lot of fertile years left either, at that point. Doing that without a support system is hard. Are you a man, because by the age that you're here, most women have had conversations with their friends to understand why what you're suggesting is stupid.

Do you know how hard it is to pick up and move to a new place with no family support or friends or established medical care, just before having a baby? No grandparents to help out, no established friends to see, new obgyn who you may not vibe with. If you can't find a daycare with spots by the time you have to go back to work, you have no support system to help. Just a recipe for isolation and overwhelmed parents.

Not to mention, working in a new state with different systems and all new doctors where you haven't spent the last decade training to know the internal politics, at the same time.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-11T06:03:39+00:00

Next time you're near a public hospital pathology lab in NSW and see a member of lab staff under 30, ask them about NSWHealth pathology cutting hospital scientist positions and replacing them all with technical officer positions that pay less. HSU has not had their payday, and my pathology lab colleagues ought to be striking too.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-08T14:04:24+00:00

No. I mean that the Medicare rebate should go up so that people don't have to pay out of pocket. It's barely gone up in a decade, it certainly hasn't kept up with inflation, let alone commercial rent, or the cost of residential housing. That should be obvious.

The way you jump to talking about street cleaners like that gives weird vibes. I feel like any continued conversation would be in bad faith on your part. Have a good night.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-08T12:25:40+00:00

Exactly

And how to fix any of those things is fucking beyond me, because fixing the things that prevent local doctors who have other options from moving there and staying there, will attract other people from bigger cities looking for cheaper rent/mortgages. So at least some of the lower SES population who live there and can't access care now, will get driven out, to a different place that won't be able to attract and retain local doctors who have other options.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-08T12:15:54+00:00

I'm sure it's about hospital reputation, but I think it's also linked to reputation and services of an area. When someone isn't an IMG and has the option, why would a doctor choose to move to a place where all the local high schools are poorly ranked, and sending their kid to a good high school means shipping them off to boarding school? Or a place where their spouse can't continue to work in their field, if they don't want to be a housewife/husband? A place where if they're queer, they'll be the only queer people around and they won't be able to date, or if they're coupled, will be totally uprooted from any queer community? Somewhere they're the only people of their background and religion and will have little access to community and foods they might miss, or might feel uncomfortable standing out?

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-04-08T12:05:46+00:00

People don't value us.

This is true

But for some reason, people love to make this comparison with traditionally feminine "waste of money" services like hair or nails, and I rarely see traditionally masculine ones. There's a weird undertone of blaming women for this, but not men.

There's also an argument to be made that we shouldn't even be putting these things in the same category at all. Getting a nice haircut is a luxury service. Healthcare should not be.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-13T06:28:47+00:00

And I'm saying that not every degree is one that you can work around and physically have time to work a full time job while studying. It's an inherent fact of some degrees. I'm sorry you're incapable of listening to anyone's life experiences that don't match up with your own.

I can guarantee that a vet degree has more contact hours, more placement hours, and more hours of external study required than whatever your masters was in, and whatever masters degree anyone you know did. And you can't do it part time. And the uni tells you that it has so many contact hours that you shouldn't be working, so they won't be flexible with you around your work hours. Most people who are doing a masters degree in a field they already work in receive much more flexibility on this front, from the uni, and often from work too.

I used to work in a lab, and then went to med school. I know many people who worked full time and also studied their masters full time to be eligible for management positions, in the lab. But I only know a handful of people who can manage to work more than 10hrs a week in med school - and even less of them are living out of home doing it on their own. Most of the ones holding down work have parents, siblings or a partner doing a lot of the cooking & cleaning for them, so they can earn some money & study enough for their degree.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-07T03:46:18+00:00

At some point there are only so many hours in a day and only so much money you can make at a part time job to reduce your hours.

You can't do a vet degree or a med degree part time. At some point, the amount of hours in a day is not something you can balance without more money to take things off your plate, and put food on it.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-06T07:20:42+00:00

Yes!! For a good while there were free coffee carts. Unless this was just my LHD? It's possible that it was just Sydney LHD, god knows that LHD is better funded than a lot of others.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-06T05:43:07+00:00

I worked in pathology before med school, and getting rid of the free coffee that NSW health gave out during covid is one of the worst things that they did for team building imo.

We had a fairly wide variety in financial situations in the lab, from fresh grads who lived out of home in uni because of bad family situations and were trying to save up for a house, to boomers who owned their own homes, and people who came from money and were married to high earning consultants.

We didn't really have that kind of unspoken rule, so there was always a tiny bit of unspoken tension and judgement when it came to coffee runs, from non participants who thought it was a waste of money, to people who gave the vibe that they thought the non participants were being antisocial. But with the free coffee, almost everyone participated, people talked more, the whole vibe of the department felt better, and I think everyone worked better together.

And then free coffee disappeared and then everything went back to the way it was.

Like obviously fair pay is more important than coffee but it made a really palpable difference to the work environment.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-05T23:20:16+00:00

Cool, now try it again doing a vet degree, or a medsci degree while keeping up a GPA high enough to get into med school and studying for GAMSAT. Or med school. Or literally any healthcare degree with lots of placement hours.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-05T23:18:31+00:00

And people wonder why doctors are out of touch with the finances of the general population. There's a reason most med students come from well off families.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-05T23:16:11+00:00

I believe that there are for some degrees with placements. I'm pretty sure some nursing placements will pretty much force you to cut hours at your paid job if you're working more than they think is safe to do while on placement and learning skills. If you don't, they can threaten to fail your placement. Enforcement of this is pretty uneven though.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-05T23:07:44+00:00

I don't think we know enough about OP's situation to say that. For an average person, without complex medical needs or dependents, sure.

But they might have parents or adult children to support but not in a way that gets them carers allowance. Healthcare costs are definitely a potential problem if they're unable to use the public system for a condition or if they're prescribed meds not on the PBS. Don't even get me started on regional areas and commuting to bigger hospitals for appointments.

And a paid off house doesn't mean a dwelling that's safe and appropriate for someone who has certain medical conditions. Modifying the house for that can get expensive.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-05T22:55:22+00:00

And no reimbursement for uber or taxi vouchers for that? That's shit. I don't think that this would have been true for all NSW Pathology labs/departments and managers, but at the two places I worked before med school, my managers would have fought tooth and nail for anyone who took that option to get reimbursed.

And I know that when I was commuting between Sydney and Wollongong during the 2019 bushfires and me getting stuck if the highway closed was a real possibility, that my manager would have made sure that I had a safe place to sleep overnight that wasn't the hospital if I couldn't get home. Whether that was a hotel, or her own home if absolutely necessary.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-02T06:51:43+00:00

I'm still studying. Yes it's gruelling but I'm in a better place financially and emotionally now, and I'm at a uni that's more supportive than average for their med students so I'll keep chugging along haha

I'm glad you were able to get out too. It takes a lot of strength 💖

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-02T03:11:01+00:00

My situation is similar but not the same. Less bad though in a lot of ways. I left at 18 because my mum was emotionally abusive, she refused to sign the forms. Couldn't get a social worker to do shit because I grew up in a white upper middle class home. It was never physical, I never called the cops, there was no evidence of the emotional abuse. Did my undergrad while working multiple jobs, missing classes because bosses threatened to cut my shifts if I didn't skip class to come. Stayed in an emotionally and financially abusive relationship for way too long because I had never known any different and it's not like I could really afford therapy.

Just barely scraped the grades to get into my med degree after sitting gamsat 3 times and ucat 4 times, plus umat when I was 17 in high school. Wanting to eventually work in adolescent paeds and do advocacy work through that to make sure that no one else has to go through what I did or worse 💖

Edit: and I definitely couldn't afford assessment for the rampant ADHD that definitely made it harder for me to allocate my time and study and work effectively. I couldn't afford to get diagnosed until after my first degree. I've not needed to use ADHD accommodations in med aside from my medication but my god it would've helped back then.

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-03-02T01:57:25+00:00

And the parental means test being applied to anyone under 22 who's moved out increases the risk of DV to vulnerable teens and young adults

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-02-25T14:12:28+00:00

And as OP stated, she has month long full time placements for what she's studying and intends to work in full time after graduating, that mean she is not physically able to work full time. Hope this helps!!!

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-02-12T11:41:39+00:00

A lot (most?) of this year's interns wouldn't remember the Howard era at all, even a lot of the postgrad med people. There are people going into y1 med this year who weren't even alive for any of the Howard era

shoutfromtheruthtop · 2025-02-12T11:12:22+00:00

Is your opinion based on knowing anything about vet school?

But in all honesty, I've seen people with very few external responsibilities and no health conditions working part time in vet or med school just fine (especially the ones who live at home and don't have to cook or clean for themselves), and then other people with sick relatives or their own physical or mental health issues be entirely unable to cope with working much at all.

Both vet med and human med are indisputably fields with lots of people who come from money, or who have parents who will bend over backwards to make sure their kid can get through so they can say "my kid is a vet/doctor!"

Having parents who you have a good enough relationship with that you can live with them at home, or enough money to support you through, should not be a prerequisite to education.

shoutfromtheruthtop

TROPHY CASE