A love for the NHS led Sam Bartlett-Pestell to swap surfing before work in Australia for cycling in rush-hour traffic across London.
Working a 40-hour week, the keen skateboarder and surfer spent nine months as a medical registrar in Perth, until he realised something was missing and returned to the UK.
Today the 31-year-old has found a new sense of job satisfaction and purpose thanks to his appointment as a respiratory registrar (ST3 level) at the Princess Royal university hospital (PRUH) last October.
There, in a role that offers a huge variety of work, he treats patients with a range of conditions from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer to asthma and pleural disease.
However, Bartlett-Pestell says it is the support of the consultants, the teamwork and opportunities for training at the PRUH, that make the job particularly enjoyable.
“My managers are all active and engaged in terms of courses and it is very easy to learn a lot through the people I work with. The hospital has a pleural clinic, which is unusual for a district hospital, and there is always a consultant attached. This means I have carried out procedures such as bronchoscopy far more [often] than I would have done otherwise.”
Encouraged to go on work-related courses, Bartlett-Pestell and a fellow registrar recently attended a three-day conference organised by the British Thoracic Society. Consultants covered their shifts so they could attend.
The hospital has a 22-bed general medical respiratory ward as well as a 12-bed high-dependency respiratory ward. A typical day for Bartlett-Pestell involves arriving on the ward at 8.45am, when he will carry out a ward round, before seeing patients referred from other wards. He works in the pleural clinic in the afternoons, before finishing between 5 and 6pm. “The consultants are very good at encouraging me to leave on time,” he says.
However, not all of Bartlett-Pestell’s time is spent dealing with patients with respiratory conditions: he is also on the general medical on-call list, working one in three Thursdays when he will see new patients coming to A&E. He also works on-call one in four weekends.
Ultimately he wants to be a consultant and hopes to spend time teaching, something he particularly enjoys. After returning from Australia in 2016, Bartlett-Pestell spent a year as a teaching fellow at Imperial College London.
His life doesn’t revolve around his work, though: he feels he has a good work-life balance. He lives in Crystal Palace, south-east London with his wife Louisa, and it is only a 40-minute bike ride to work. In his spare time, he runs and goes skateboarding. He is also a member of the London Surf Club – joining them for occasional weekend trips to Croyde in Devon or Newquay in Cornwall.
“Before I went to Australia I felt I was suffering a burnout. Having time out allowed me to recharge and I felt a renewed energy to go back into the NHS. I feel more empowered in my job now and that is because of the support of my consultants, who are fantastic.”
