I don't wish to depress you having just reached your CCT but....
For example (and as you allude to when you mention EWTD) the EWTD never existed "in my day" when I was a junior. There was no notion of an SHO having "worked nights" and hence off the next day. I'm not saying it was right...but in my first SHO job in 1988 I was on a 1:2. That meant I could work: Monday = 24 hrs, then no break into Tuesday= 8 hrs, then Wednesday 24 hrs, then no break into Thursday 8hrs, then Friday, Saturday and Sunday all 24 hrs each.
That would amount to a 136 hour week.
That would then be followed by a week (because it was a 1:2) of: Monday =8 hrs , then Tuesday = 24hrs, then Wednesday= 8hrs, then Thursday = 24hrs, then Friday = 8 hrs. Giving a total of (a mere) 72 hours for that week.
But then the next week would be back up to 136 hours...because it was a 1:2.
And whilst on-call I'd have to drive between 3 hospitals to do it. The distance between Burnley and Bury was a 34 mile round trip. Between Burnley and Bolton was 62 miles. I remember the mileage to this day!
Throughout my whole career as a Junior I never went below a 1:4 and then only briefly as a Medical HO at the Royal London for 3 months. As an SPR in the West of Scotland we covered 17 A&E departments and had to travel between then and had to do the operations mostly on site...carrying the surgical equipment in the boots of our cars. And get on with the ops without a consultant in sight.
I remember one night having just walked out of Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock at 1am in the morning, in the winter, having started operating on a case at 8am the preceding morning only to get a bleep because I was on-call to go to Stirling. Even Google Maps shows that's over 50 miles one way (and that's an under estimate I think)...and you had to do it. And then be back at Kilmarnock to take the Ward Round the next morning at Kilmarnock.
And then...whether you were on-call or not...you were expected to turn up every Saturday morning between 9am- Midday for a "teaching ward round" at the central hospital. It wasn't a "teaching ward round" at all. It was an exercise in ritual humiliation conducted by the Professor upon you in front of all the other juniors and overseas visiting doctors. You just had to endure and suffer it. And there was no notion of making a complaint about "bullying". You just had to take it....and make sure your patients were "right"!
"Bullying" wasn't even a word in the Medical Training Dictionary. Well, maybe it was and the definition was: "This is how you train doctors to be good doctors."
When I did my surgical house job (and bear in mind I wasn't a naïve 'kid' by this stage as I'd already done a dental degree as well as medicine by then, had been married for 5 years and was a father) my consultant pulled out a pen knife on me one day on a ward round and threatened me with it in my face for daring to order an ultra-sound on a cholecystectomy patient of his that I thought may have had a post-op collection. "How dare I, as a House Officer, suggest that one of his patients had a post-op complication!"
The people I see now coming through as trainees and close to the end of their training are scared to do what I wasn't expected to just get on with myself (and get right) as an SHO back in the 1980s.
But I think we've digressed from the original topic? :lol:
) but when it came to it I backed off - these cars do get under your skin 
