Is anybody actually in charge?

I’m employed by a company to do a job and I do it well. Unfortunately, the people who run my company have decided to sack all the people doing the job I am and make us re-apply again for the jobs we are already doing.

They said I can only apply for four positions in four different areas of the country. I’m not happy about it, but I dutifully go through the processes and, because I do my job well, I get shortlisted and interviewed for all four positions I’ve applied for.

I spend a lot of time, effort and mental energy preparing for the series of interviews to try and perform to the best of my ability, after all these interviews are important and I don’t want to be unemployed come the summertime. These interviews are also very stressful but I try my hardest at each of them.

On Friday night my employers email me to let me know that they’ve changed their minds (again) and ask me to guess which interview I’ve done best in (they’re not going to actually tell me which I’ve done best in). Then they say that I can only apply the job in which I believe the interview went well and the rest of the interviews will count for nothing.

My contract is being terminated in the summer and I only have one opportunity to apply for one job to replace it.

Currently, in my company, there are 32,300 people doing my job. These people are competing for about 21,000 positions and come summertime, a third of us will be out of a job.

If anyone told me about a situation like this, I’d advise them to change companies to one that actually valued the hard work of its employees and didn’t treat them in such a slipshod, slapdash, disdainful manner.

Trouble is, my company is the NHS and my job is a junior doctor.

I don’t want to leave the NHS but I’m asking myself, with increasing regularity, “Is it worth it?”