COMMENT Of course, there's never a great time to get seriously ill. If you work in the NHS, however, chances are that your experiences will have particularly prejudiced you against August. Charmingly known as the "killing season", this is the month when junior doctors start their first posts after graduation. The anecdotes are ripe and scary: junior doctors getting entirely lost on their way to a cardiac arrest call; mistakenly writing up quantities of drugs more suitable for horses; being harassed by nurses and ending up in tears in the toilet; or simply forgetting about patients on distant wards altogether.
Luckily there's not a drop of truth in this. The mortality figures stay even over the summer, despite the new intake of fresh medical blood. A study in the British Medical Journal more than a decade ago compared the death rates of July, when junior doctors would have been at their most experienced, with those of August, when they would have been starting out, and concluded that the "killing season" was but medical myth.
