Learning and Developing Junior Doctors

Learning and developing junior doctors
Student name
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Introduction
Junior doctors face diverse challenges during their early years of career development.
Despite hospitals and medics scheduling mentorship program, the majority of junior doctors find
these programs inefficient and ineffective to support them in their early days of workplace
exposure. Furthermore, without effective learning support, junior doctors struggle with diverse
organizational challenges such as communication barriers during their daily routines. In addition,
scholars suggest that some junior doctors also end up experiencing frustration in their career
development and others fail significantly to utilize their abilities as expected and provide
effective customer delivery Schaufeli, Bakker, Van der Heijden and Prins, 2009 p.155-157). It is
due to these negative experiences faced by junior doctors in the early stages of their career
development that the paper seeks to examine learning issues faced by junior doctors in their
workplaces.
Issues
The learning issues faced by junior doctors that will be discussed in the report include
communication barriers, training and selection, invisible hierarchy structure and knowledge
transfer. The paper will also offer a recommendation for suitable approaches that can handle the
issues.
Communication barriers
Communication is a complex, multidimensional and dynamic process. Failure of
practicing effective communication hinders the provision of standardized services in a patient
care setting. Lack of effective communication can lead to dissatisfactions among the
participants’ parties, possible maltreatment and exposure to complication and misunderstanding.
Furthermore, employing effective communication skills between junior and senior doctors in a
workplace context is a valuable tool for assessing patient needs and providing them with

appropriate knowledge transfer and exchange of information, emotional support and physical
care.
A communication barrier creates a wide gap between junior and senior doctors in
workplaces that significantly affects customer delivery. A research conducted by Johnston (2015
p.45) shows that the gap between junior and senior doctors as a result of communication
breakdown contributes to 60 percent of junior doctors failing to air their concerns to appropriate
personnel. Furthermore, the research also showed that the majority of these junior doctors
preferred written communication over oral communication and they had little contributions
during the departmental meetings. Therefore, lack of confidence is a significant issue challenging
junior officers when conversing with senior doctors. For example, a junior doctor may encounter
a scenario that requires consultation of senior members but due to fear he or she may fail to ask
questions regarding the scenario.
Lack of effective guidance significantly influences the way communication converses
between junior doctors and senior doctors. For example, with senior doctors having a busy
schedule of providing patient care, time for guiding junior staff and teaching them effective
communication skills is always limited. In addition, with limited guidance, junior doctors fit in
workplace environment through self-learning (Weller, Barrow and Gasquoine, 2011 p.478) and
therefore, they end up lacking desired effective communication skills which are physically
learned from senior doctors. For example, junior doctors may lack communications skills of
presenting patient care reports (mediocre description of core ideas) although they have self-
learned on how to communicate fluently to the public
Training and selection
Training and selection are key human resource components towards the development of
an effective learning organization. However, several factors affect how training and selection