A friendly and interesting department with a back breaking rota and fixed annual leave. Loved the team and truly learnt a lot via experience, but this department is very busy and does not leave room for any real protected teaching or training. The rota involves 7 day, 70 hour weeks as standard, often with day to night shifts with minimal time off; ...More

The training here is limited only by the clinical experience available in the region. The consultants in the region are knowledgeable, approachable and supportive. I have found the training support to be helpful although limited by bureaucracy and as slow to make changes as any part of the NHS. The South West is beautiful and most people have chose ...More

Awful, on calls are basically f1 on calls carrying bleeps, you're on call so much you barely see your base ward

Put off writing this for a while until I moved as I have mixed feelings and didn’t want to seem negative to some of the great staff in the department. The theatre based Anaesthetic consultants who help run the department are friendly and invest a lot into trainee development. This is not the case for the intensive care side (except a few). There is ...More

Dependent entirely on hospital. Teaching is atrocious/barely existent. Some helpful/ nice consultants who want to teach but also a lot who can’t understand why you’re not staying late / spending your weekends to do research /QI/ publications. The bigger hospitals have the worse combination of not allowing you much freedom during daylight hours a ...More