It's exam week. Actually, this year every ninth week is exam weeks. But still.

Apparently Internal Medicine is the hardest rotation. You have to learn everything that's not surgery, pediatrics, O&G, mental health, General Practice, anaesthetics, Rural Medicine. So, pretty much everything.

My colleagues and I have been pulling roughly 10 hours days at the hospital for the last seven or so weeks, and for me, it's been great. Involved, intense, insightful, the works. The 'long' hours were starting to get to me a few weeks ago, then two things happened.

Firstly, I read through the latest AIHW report "Health and community services labour force 2006" (released March 9, 2009) about the hours that health professionals pull. Of the 57,019 doctors in Australia in 2006, the average working week was 45 hours. The lowest average working weeks were scored by the pathologists(40), radiologists(41) and rheumatologists(41). Worth mentioning are GPs(43), Residents(48) and Physicians(46). The most hours all went to surgical specialties (average of 54), most notably paediatric surgeons, who worked on average 61 hours a week. Which, I think, all seems to make sense. There's not really part of me thinking "Wow, that's waaaay to much hard yakka", or finding it wholly unreasonable. Demanding job, long hours. Makes sense to me.

Secondly, I arrived early one morning, about five past seven, and find that the Med Student common room has been overrun by half a dozen registrars. They're handing around printouts to each other and going through old exams to prepare for their Part Ones. I was impressed. They'd been there since about 5.30am. Studying. Now they were packing up to start their twelve-hour shifts. As doctors. Where they were actually responsible for patients and decision-making and teaching juniors and medical students. I was awed.

There's loads of talk around about the tough hours that interns, junior doctors and docs work, but they don't really approach the issue of 'study time'. The next time some pissant 20-something medical student complains about how hard it all is, how study wrecks their social life, how they can't play sport anymore, just think about the registrars. Their only study time comes between twelve hour shifts.

Now that's Hard Yakka.