Doctors ‘intimidated and belittled by colleagues’

Resident doctors face “intimidating” communications from nurses and have been reduced to tears by consultants in a hospital service with long-standing medical training concerns.

Acute internal medicine at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust is one of a small number of services nationally under “enhanced monitoring” by the General Medical Council because of concerns over the training and treatment of resident doctors.

BHRUHT has been subject to this status for seven years. But HSJ can reveal that an education quality review by an NHS England team last year found there were still major problems.

The report, which was released to HSJ this month after a Freedom of Information request, said the NHSE team observed trainees working in acute internal medicine – known as the acute medical take – “crying as a direct result of inappropriate communication with emergency department consultants”.

Corridor care was becoming “somewhat normalised”, according to the findings, with corridors set up like wards. There were cases of patients “going missing” or being transferred before being reviewed by a consultant, and there was poor communication between trainees and consultants.

Some patients did not get a consultant review even if they had been there for 24 hours, and workload in the same day emergency care unit “felt unsafe and chaotic”.

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Source: HSJ, 31 March 2026