Getting ready for work this week, as I grabbed my stethoscope and NHS badge, I caught a radio discussion on the latest crisis in accident and emergency wards and all I could do was shrug in resignation. A&E departments are having to close their doors because of the lack of correctly trained staff required to safely run their departments, with Chorley A&E doing so in April and Grantham looking set to shut at night due to staff shortages.

Six years ago, when I started my career as an A&E doctor, departments had plans in place to cope with extreme pressures. If a department became so busy that it was deemed “unsafe” by senior A&E staff, they would request a “divert”, where ambulances would be redirected to other nearby A&E departments until the workload had been eased. Now there is nowhere to divert to since everywhere is in exactly the same position. So when they get too unsafe they have no choice but to turn people away.

This is not because too many people are becoming acutely unwell and arriving en masse to well stocked and staffed A&E departments. Departments are being forced to close their doors because they lack the manpower to cope. This is the result of long-term tactics at government level, aimed at changing the NHS as we know it by causing the erosion of both services and the morale of those who are on the frontline trying desperately to make it work.

After years of working through various A&E crises, with the backdrop of doom-monger headlines about the care we are providing, I am currently an emergency medicine doctor on respite. I have worked in some of the busiest A&Es in the country and now, for the sake of sanity and well-being, I am having a change. I just needed a breather, time to take stock, to have a life and to re-evaluate. So I am working on a rehabilitation ward, and while my patients recover, so do I. I am not here permanently – it’s a locum position in a rural area that is finding it a challenge to recruit staff. A situation replicated all over the country.

Jeremy Hunt has bulldozed NHS morale into the ground and yet his stampede continues

I have an A&E job lined up for later in the year, but I have been tactical about where. I am going to Wales. I can’t work in a place where Jeremy Hunt has jurisdiction to implicate his unethical plans. It will mean an upheaval of my personal life, maybe having to pay for two sets of accommodation to make it work and living in a different place to my husband. But these are decisions we are having to make to find ways to keep being A&E doctors. My morale is at an all-time low and I need to get it back to continue to do the job I love.

You have to psyche yourself up for every A&E shift, mentally and physically. Get your game face on, focus, blast through and take it as it hits you full force. Times that by 10 for a night shift or a weekend when chances are you won’t know your colleagues as they will be locums brought in to make up the shortfall.

We are fed up of hearing about how overcrowded and understaffed hospitals are. The workforce pulls together and makes it work. Even the most senior emergency medicine doctor in the country, Clifford Mann, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine: after completing his duties in London, he gets on a train, back to his own A&E department in Somerset for a shift finishing late into the night. It’s gruelling work and only for the committed.

My A&E colleagues are finding alternatives all around me. Some have left for academia, some have left medicine and some have left the country. Working in A&E, with a severely unwell patient arriving in extremis does not just need someone with a medical degree certificate. It needs expertise, skill and experience. And a significant number of those who fit this brief are leaving. We should be worried.

Jeremy Hunt has bulldozed NHS morale into the ground and yet his stampede continues. For the sake of patients and staff, someone who really should be getting a new job is him. As Hunt stays in his role, implementing bullishly his unsafe plans, A&E doctors are leaving theirs in droves.