Why I became an occupational physician ...
Email: stewart{at}stewartlloyd.com
There are one or two colleagues who already know how I became an occupational physician, it being the sort of ‘swing the lamp’ story that emerges late at night in conference hotels. I was, at the time, a medical officer in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) Service, the seagoing arm of the Royal Naval Supplies and Transport Service, an organization that supports the navies of NATO. The job could be very professionally isolated but I was fortunate enough to have the support of my shipmates and, of course, living cheek by jowl with them, I learnt a great deal about their jobs. Fitness for work was an integral part of the assessments I carried out on the patients who presented at the door of the sickbay and, in common with many small organizations, even if only a few of the crew were incapacitated, this could have a serious effect on the ship's ability to carry out its mission and even compromise its safety.
My ship was on the final stage of the journey home from a long deployment when one of the crew had an acute psychotic episode. We were lucky enough to be going alongside in a Royal Naval dockyard that had a nearby medical centre and, of course, the first thing I did when we docked was call for backup. The ambulance duly arrived and one of the personnel inside it was Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Geoff Helliwell, RN. A few days after delivering the unwell sailor to the nearest psychiatric hospital, Geoff and I were sitting over a glass or two in the wardroom when the conversation turned to career options. The RFA was great fun, I had seen a fairly good chunk of the world and had some extraordinary experiences, but I did not feel that I wanted to spend the rest of my working life at sea. I was unsure what the future held (except that I was certain that I did not want to go back to the NHS) and, as Geoff was already a trainee in occupational medicine, he suggested that I consider it. I knew next to nothing about it but as we sat and talked about what the specialty involved, I found myself thinking, ‘This is what I already do’. Geoff proposed me for the Society of Occupational Medicine and, following acceptance, I attended a few meetings of the London Group. I was then hooked.
Applying for formal training posts was difficult when I was spending up to 8 months of the year at sea but I eventually secured one with British Steel at Scunthorpe, and was lucky enough to have my seagoing experience retrospectively recognized as training time by the faculty. My original NHS career, as an ENT surgeon, also came in handy when dealing with one of the commonest physical hazards in heavy industry, noise.
I have had an ‘interesting’ medical career, with a number of abrupt right-angled turns and a great deal of serendipity, but I would not swap a day of it for anything else.
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