Night practicalities

Your handover list will disappear and reappear or take a full sabbatical every five minutes unless you religiously put it in your pocket or bag every single time you need to do something.

Keep it away from tables and desks where unforgiving stashes of notes will pile on top of it. Save yourself the stress of losing your list of jobs – once is enough to imprint the necessity of this on you forever.

While hopefully you will have taken the phone numbers of your registrar and FY2 doctor before you start, sometimes they will be too busy to answer.

A common dilemma is reviewing a patient who probably needs a ceiling of care in place, but nothing has formally been documented or put in place. As an FY1, if you cannot get hold of the registrar, you have to assume the patient is for full escalation until you have successfully contacted a senior. Legally it is difficult to defend making that decision yourself, as an FY1, even when it seems so obvious.

Prep practicalities

Practically, there are a few steps you can apply to stave off the aggressive crank that you become at 3.43am when a nurse bleeps to ask you for an 8am antibiotics prescription.

Prepare food and dinners in advance before on-call stints. Different doctors try to adjust their sleeping pattern in different ways; the key is getting a nap the day before the night shift begins, but you have to make yourself sleepy for this. Some people stay up late the night before and others wake up early the day the nights begin.

After the night shifts end, don't spend that day in bed. Nap for a few hours, then try to maintain a normal wake-sleep cycle to help you quickly adjust to normality again.

So there we are – good luck and bon voyage!

Easing the pain of your first night shift

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Easing the pain of your first night shift