I agree with you as regards access to undergraduate medical education. However we are talking about qualified earning medical practitioners not students with no source of income. The minimum salary for a newly qualified doctor is £22,190 and that’s before any additional payments. Doctors further up the training scale earn more. You can find exact details at this link:
http://www.bma.org.uk/sc/employmentandcontracts/pay/doctorspaysupp.jsp

As such, how much more do such doctors need to be financially nursed through their career choices when their choice of postgraduate career path is their’s alone and they are earning a salary that can easily support career advancement should tney wish it?

We should feel obliged to take responsibility for other peoples personal decisions in some situations because, as in this example, we like to have good surgeons.
They require the gift (I would say mostly physiological) of extended practical ability coupled with good old fashioned intelligence.
It is not possible to choose to simply pay for and educate yourself to have this combination of abilities and become a good surgeon and these types of people are no more likely to be from privileged backgrounds than from poor ones. They certainly should not be excluded because of lack of money.
Get the fees low and the criteria high.
This is a developing ‘ relatively modern’ philosophical idea which is gaining not waning in popularity. Consider athletes as an example, there are many more.

Department of Philosophy University of Oxford

No I haven’t forgotten what it was like when I was a junior doctor. It was harder and we were paid less. Trust me on this. Exams cost less but that was then and, as a proportion of salary, probably were more.

As regards paying for rights of passage medicine gets off lightly. I have a young relative who is a lawyer and wishes to become an advocate in Scotland. His training, after a law degree, is nine months unpaid study to be admitted to the Faculty of Advocates. He certainly does not feel the world owes him a living. Sadly you and Helen seem to think it does.

I say again, as nobody tells you what branch of the profession to enter when you qualify, why should the rest of us feel obliged to take responsibility for what is a personal decision? You’ve got or are about to get your basic medical degree. How much further do you want or need to be spoon fed?

Why should such costs be a right of passage in any profession? An engineering friend of mine is being sent on training courses by his company to improve his skills at no cost to him. Equally the same is true for my friends in teaching with the local teaching authority paying. To me it seems like medicine is getting worse what with the recent loss of free hospital accommodation for first year doctors. Perhaps Dr Neilson has forgotten what it was like when he was first starting his career, or maybe costs have gone up without the associated increase in wage making it more difficult now.

Your post, although heartfelt, annoyed me. Nobody has asked you to be a surgeon, it is your choice. Given it is your choice, why do you assume the rest of the us should feel obliged to pay for it or even support you? You seem to want to have your cake and eat it. Sadly for you, as you appear to be finding out, real life is not the way you want it to be.

Welcome to the real world. As a FY1 you earn considerably more than many people you work with who support whole families. If you doubt this speak to the nurses and clerical staff in your hospital. Postgraduate medicine is not university with knobs on. You are now, like it or lump it, a qualified medical practitioner, earning a salary, who now has to make decisions as regards your future that have costs and implications. What you do is entirely up to you. Don’t expect people like me to feel sorry for your alleged difficulties; ‘Oh me, a holiday missed, what am I to do?. Oh Lordy, those pesky Royal Colleges demand cash to sit thier exams-how dare they! The naughty post graduate deanery insists I do some work rather than be a perpetual student-it’s just not fair’ (Stamp foot and hold breath until sick).

Grow up. You are privileged, educated and employed. What more do you expect at your stage of experience and training? If you want to be a surgeon, physician or GP do so but do NOT bleat about the very minor sacrifices you may have to make. Absolutely nobody is interested Compared to trainee barristers, lawyers, teachers or whatever you have it easy.

In case you think I don’t understand I’m a consultant haematologist, university teacher, Royal College Council Member and Examiner and have worked bloody hard, with a whole range of sacrifices, to get where I am now. Your concerns about where you are now and what you have to do strike me as self indulgent, blinkered, nonsense.

I think that it completely unacceptable that people with a lower income are discriminated against in this way, and could potentially be ruining their chances of a career in surgery because of the money that they do (or do not) have!

1. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, College events http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/education/events/index.php