Abstract

A number of professional groups face the conflict of providing a service to their organisation as a whole, and wider to its clients, while continuing to develop their skills and knowledge professionally, in order to be able to perform effectively in their current role as well as future ones, within a certain amount of time available to them. The introduction of reduced-hours legislation under the European Working Time Directive for junior doctors has posed an organisational problem for NHS Trusts in the UK, who need to reconcile the training and service needs of the profession and the service within the more confined resource of time. This research has identified a distinct lack of clarification of the concepts of training and service in the literature, and no understanding of how these are linked to the activities that junior doctors participate, nor to the working system in which they exist. It uses a constructivist mixed method approach to exploring what is meant by training and service, how this is linked to the operational day-to-day activities in the working lives of junior doctors and how changes in these working and training practices affect the nature and type of service and training activity for the medical workforce and organisational system as a whole. Its contributions to knowledge are multifaceted, ranging from the contributions to exploring the concepts of "training" and "service" and how they relate to activity, an understanding of the system, Its entities and relationships, as well as a new application of a business modelling technique. While it uses junior doctors at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust as the specific area for study, Its findings are generalisable to the organisational context of other NHS Trusts, as well as other professional groups.

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2009

DOI

10.24382/3391

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