Australian Doctor Australian Doctor 27th October 2017 | Page 32

Guest Views
OPINION
DR JUSTIN COLEMAN
The rookie will see you now
Some doctors
are calling for
the term ‘junior
doctor’ to be
ditched as it’s
belittling.
W
HEN is a
junior doctor
not a junior
doctor?
The answer is not ‘When
they grow up’, but ‘When
they work in the UK’,
according to England’s chief
medical officer.
The ‘junior’ descriptor
was flagged this month by
a professor from the Uni-
versity of Oxford as being
“unjust, progressively inac-
curate and detrimental to
self-esteem”.
However, the online
response from non-senior
doctors themselves was less
vocal.
Some noted that deline-
ations in levels of medical
responsibility already exist
and obscuring them with
a more cryptic title would
help nobody.
The ‘junior’ debate is
merely the latest in the end-
less series of quandaries
about naming groups of
people.
If there is one universal
rule about naming any pop-
ulation that is a minority or
vulnerable, it is this: after a
decade or so, the name gets