Mabel is struggling. She doesn’t know the UK well and has just moved from the city to a tiny bedsit in a run-down county town to start her GP training. Her husband is working on a different continent, and her three small children are on a third, being cared for by her in-laws. She’s scared to go out into the town after dark and is miserable and lonely. Her mother-in-law is supportive of her career but it’s so difficult to speak with the kids online and she’s worried that her son is struggling at school. Every day she gets up in the dark and catches a bus, then a train, then a bus to another town where she is working in a hospital in an older-person care ward. She worked in this specialty in her own country but here everything is different, and she feels bewildered most of the time. None of her previous experience seems to help her and she sees the nurses and other doctors rolling their eyes as she tries to make sense of the differing medical practices and customs. She thought she would find friends in the hospital but instead she feels completely alone.

Plus she has another completely unexpected struggle. She has discovered she has something called an ‘e-portfolio’ that’s apparently incredibly important. She’s supposed to fill it in with ‘clinical case reviews’ …