In memory of Professor Jason Arday. As a black doctor who trained in the uk, I find it quite disturbing the treatment of fellow black porfoseesionals. I went through similar bullying and harassement whilst on the GP VTS ion cambridge over 12 years ago. My judgement was questioned at all times and I was made to feel inadequate and inferior. By the grace of God I left the Uk in 2014 for Australia and have never looked back. Im now practicing medicine in Australia in a much better and supportrive environment.

I didn’t choose general practice. I’d spent years building a career in another part of medicine, and when that path closed to me — after more near-misses and shut doors than I care to count — I came to general practice because I had run out of anywhere else to go. I arrived quietly defeated, certain I was settling for something smaller than the work I’d trained my whole life for.

It took a few months before I understood how wrong I had been.

Everything walks through that door. The undifferentiated, the frightening, the ordinary that turns out not to be ordinary at all — and you are the one who has to know what to do with it. There is no narrow field to retreat into, no one further down the corridor to hand it to. Slowly it stopped feeling like the thing I’d ended up with, and started feeling like the most complete medicine there is. What a privilege, I realised, to be the person someone comes to first.

I fell in love with it. I just never expected to.

I came to all of this later than most, an international graduate, and I live with anxiety that turns severe in exactly the settings where you are being watched and judged, which, it turns out, is most of how you become a doctor here.

The system felt opaque and lonely. Built, it seemed, for people who already understood how it worked. I did not. What I needed wasn’t only knowledge. It was the feeling that someone had walked this path ahead of me and could turn around and say: “here, this way”.

There is a moment I still think about — being called to an emergency and realising, with a kind of quiet astonishment, that I knew precisely what to do. The fear stepped back. Competence stepped forward. It was the first time the two had ever changed places. So if you are out there on this road right now, feeling lost and alone: I was too. I promise you it does not stay that way.