Hi, Care of the Elderly SHO. Can I help?

Yeap. That's how I'm spending this cold but lovely weekend.
Doing 12 hour shifts (8:30 to 20:30) Friday through to Monday at the hospital.
Now that I've got some spare time, thought I'd blog about what goes on in a standard hospital out of hours (after 5pm weekdays, all weekend).
Generally, things are run with "skeletal staff". For every major speciality (Medicine, Elderly, Surgery, Paediatrics, and Gynaecology) there are 2 junior staff (House officers and Senior house officers [HO/SHO]) and one registrar (grown up guy about to become a consultant) looking after all the current in patients and also any new admissions that come our way (via GPs or A&E).
The big bosses (consultants) are at home and can be contacted 24 hours a day in case of emergencies.
To put it in numbers, our hospital has 600+ in patients, looked after by a handful of juniors. Not everyone is sick and needs attention of course, but everyone is a "potential sicky" and can "go off" at any time. Also, generally in every major speciality at least 15 new patients are admitted that are acutely ill and need urgent attention.
This puts alot of strain on everyone working out of hours. Some times it's nice and quiet and not many people are admitted and all the wards are fine. But sometimes all hell breaks loose and you have one person having a heart attack on one ward, the other dropping his blood pressure on the other, a really sick person in resus (A&E) not breathing, and a HO that's confused about a patient they just asked him to see. All in all, it can get quite hectic!
But I guess one shouldn't moan. Choosing medicine as a career (well I didn't really choose, they forced me to it!!) comes with it's pros (non I can think of) and cons (I'll write a book about that some day!) :)
And finally, if you managed to read all this and still haven't manged to browse away to something alot more interesting (http://www.mysticalball.com comes to mind), then I thank you for being a loyal G-D but also urge you to go do something else on your weekend!

Till later then, good delicious!