Junior doctors will be expected to routinely travel through time and will work until they are at least 1500 years old, Health Secretary Steve Barclay announced today. The policy announcement comes after Barclay uncovered a successful regeneration scheme for medical staff, codenamed Doctor Who, running since 1963, at the Gallifrey NHS Foundation Trust near Liverpool.
'The abilities to distort time, communicate via telepathy, and to transform into a spanking new doctor when you reach the age of around 750 is vital to our goal of providing a full-service, competitive 21st century health service', announced Barclay. 'Project TimeLord will just formalise practices which we already impose on our junior doctors - the expectation that they can be in two places at once as a result of huge staff shortages, for example’.
‘The poor sods will be too busy with crippling workloads, complex, multi-layered plot lines and chasing down Daleks that they won’t notice the 25% real pay cut we've imposed on them over the last decade. Our patient data shows incredibly high satisfaction with all 13 time-travelling doctors to date…with the exception, of course, of Sylvester McCoy’ said Barclay.
Barclay is thought to be particularly impressed with the Doctors' physical characteristic of having 2 hearts, which compensates for him being a heartless b@*tard himself.