Locum Doctors - an area for NHS savings?

[Maccapacca]

We pay 500 a day for a reasonable freelance qs and 750 to 1000 for a claims qs. It's just counting bricks.

I'm astounded a doc doesn't get more. At least as a qs I don't have to stick my finger up some strangers bum.

 

[Englander91]

£1000+ a day is too much.

It appears these days there's more locums than ever and these vastly inflated cost per day can only be adding to the problem as I know given a choice if I was a doctor and could earn £100-140K per year at a fixed place of work or double that as a locum (or work 50% less hours for the same £100-140K) then I'd do it and the fact I'd be costing the NHS a lot more money it can't really afford is easily outweighed by human greed that most of us can't resist. Indemity costs while obviously part of the higher per day cost don't seem to come into if the above posters 8 sessions cost £10K/year when the locum could make 10 times that extra over a normal salaried position.

Here's a radical idea for Doctors and Dentists. If you work for the NHS, you work solely for the NHS and are salaried. If you want to work privately pr become a locum then thats fine but please don't allow doctors who work in the private practice 2 days a week to work 3 days a week in the NHS to make ends meet. Same goes for NHS dentists, if £100K+ a year isn't enough solely looking after NHS patients, then go 100% private.

Soon I suspect the amount of people that are willing to pay private will be exhausted and Doctors and Dentists will once again embrace working solely for the NHS despite the piffling £100-£150K salary they'll have to make do on.

I'm just trying to understand your argument - why should doctors not be "allowed" to split their time between private and NHS?

 

[dowie]

the higher cost of treatment will be partly down to paying an NHS consultant £100K+ a year to work 2 or 3 days a week

What???

They'll maybe get 100k a year working 5 days a week, some are still below 100k but regardless, their private work done away from the NHS has little to do with rising NHS costs or locums - if anything private work, when the patient is otherwise eligible for NHS treatment, saves the NHS money and resources

 

[dowie]

Your welcome to prove otherwise but I suspect many that work NHS 2-3 days a week and private the other 2-3 days, earn >40-60% pro-rata NHS salary on the days they're in the NHS.

where are you getting your NHS salary figures?

https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/about/careers-medicine/pay-doctors

As a consultant you'll earn a basic salary of £76,001 to £102,465 per year, depending on the length of your service. You may apply for local and national Clinical Excellence Awards. This is a competitive process which takes into account work that you do over and above delivering your basic job requirements. In addition if you take on extra responsibilities, for example in management or education, you may expect to be paid more.

Consultants can also supplement their salary by working in private practice if they wish. The opportunities available will depend on their specialty areas and the time they wish to spend on this outside of their NHS contracted hours.

40 - 60% of 76-102k isn't 100k+

Obvs there is extra pay for additional appointments etc.. but again, you're talking about people working 2-3 days a week not 5 days a week.

perhaps I should ask my company if I can go down to working 3 days a week for them (but keep 75% of my salary) then do private work for the other 2 - do you think they'd be happy with that?

part time jobs do exist, maybe you're not valuable/useful enough for it to be worthwhile for them or maybe your job isn't suitable for part time work


I also have to make the point again that this has very little to do with locums

 

[dowie]

I don't follow why you're conflating consultants doing private work outside the NHS with locums contracted to work for the NHS?

Also

yes there's addtional pay for appointments etc as you've stated and quoted basic salaries but you know and I know most NHS doctors (other than newly qualified junior doctors) take home north of £100K/year

you seemed to be claiming that doctors working part time, 2-3 days a week, typically earn that, I'd suspect you're mistaken given that full time consultants start at 76k according to the NHS website and their basic maxes out at 102.

I'll ask again where are you getting your NHS salary figures?

also "assuming every locum can take home £1000 a day" - do you have anything to suggest that is a reasonable assumption?

 

[Dr House]

Very few locums make that sort of money. They are paid by GP surgeries which are private organisations so its up to them what they pay. Typically a locum GP will get £60 per hour, they pay around £10 to £12k per year in insurance, £1400 in GMC, Collage and BMA fees. If they don't work they don't get paid, that and the stress of working in a new place every few days or weeks makes its not really worth the money.

People seem to think doctors are over paid but we really are not.

As a junior I get £30k base for 40 hours a week, Plus another £12k for a extra 8 hours and (nights, evenings and weekends)
I do around 5 to 10 hours a week as good will unpaid. I pay for my own courses, exams GMC, BMA and other fees which comes to about £1.4k per year.
Also don't forget most have £75 to £90k in debt which they pay interest on and are slowly paying back.

We get rotated every 4 or 6 months which could be in a different hospital quit a long way away, you end up having to move house every couple of years because your next post is at the opposite end of the county. This all costs money to do.

On the very small amount of time we have off the juniors often do extra locum shifts for a little bit of extra cash, SHO level are paid around £35 per hour which is hardly huge money when you consider we are actually saving lives and putting up with so much crap at work. I actually got urinated on recently (not a accident).

Our hourly rate is something like £15/h

 

[Dr House]

Maths

237,000 licensed doctors in the UK, lets say on average they earn £100k/year = £23.7 billion
Lets up their salaries to £150k/year on average as they're worth it = £35.5 billion

Of course there's lots of doctors perhaps earning a bit less then £100k, many earning considerably more, quite a lot of locums costs 3 times the cost of a salaried doctor and many doctors working 2 or 3 days NHS for almost full pay then topping that up with private work but the costs are staggering and while I don't have the figures for locums or NHS/Private workers its clear to see that even 5% to 10% working as locums lifts the NHS wage bill by BILLIONS

http://www.gmc-uk.org/doctors/register/search_stats.asp

honestly your talking out of your ass

The average pay of a doctor is not £100k

https://www.bma.org.uk/advice/employment/pay/consultants-pay-england

To get to £102k you have to have been a consultant for 19 years, plus the 8 to 10 years as a junior doctor until you make it to consultant.

This is what a junior doctor is paid
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice/employment/pay/juniors-pay-england
Year
year 1 - 22,862
year 2 - 28,357
year 3 - 30,302
year 4 - 32,156
year 5 - 34,746
year 6- 36,312
year 7 - 38,200
year 8 - 40,090
year 9 - 41,979
year 10 - 43,868

The above is plus anything between 0 and 40% banding for doing on calls and the extra 8 contracted hours.

Then you become a consultant and your pay goes up to £76k

So the average is WAY off the 100k you are claiming.

Also keep in mind we are about to take a pay cut which will be around 15%

 

[Minstadave]

yes there's addtional pay for appointments etc as you've stated and quoted basic salaries but you know and I know most NHS doctors (other than newly qualified junior doctors) take home north of £100K/year.

This is just uninformed rubbish that you're probably finding in the Tory press.

The majority of consultants earn under 100k a year, along will all salaried GPs, all junior doctors, and most locum doctors.

I've been qualified for 9 years and earn under 60k.

GP partners might hit north of 100k, along with a few conatants with clinical excellence awards or those with private practice o top of their NHS work but they are in a minority and all at the top of their areas either clinically or in terms of experience/responsibility.

The reason locums are in the press along with health tourism is because it's a Tory mud flinging exercise to blame the utter disaster that was the NHS this winter on anything but government under funding, poor staffing and cuts.

 

[Minstadave]

Your welcome to prove otherwise but I suspect many that work NHS 2-3 days a week and private the other 2-3 days, earn >40-60% pro-rata NHS salary on the days they're in the NHS.

perhaps I should ask my company if I can go down to working 3 days a week for them (but keep 75% of my salary) then do private work for the other 2 - do you think they'd be happy with that?

The consultant contract is widely available and works nothing like you suggests. The same for NHS GPs, I can't think of any that work in this way.

I can't think of a single doctor who works in the manner you suggest. In fact you can't work part time and locum on top as a junior doctor, you'd fail your annual progression assessment.

 

[Destination]

Here's a radical idea for Doctors and Dentists. If you work for the NHS, you work solely for the NHS and are salaried. If you want to work privately pr become a locum then thats fine but please don't allow doctors who work in the private practice 2 days a week to work 3 days a week in the NHS to make ends meet. Same goes for NHS dentists, if £100K+ a year isn't enough solely looking after NHS patients, then go 100% private.

Soon I suspect the amount of people that are willing to pay private will be exhausted and Doctors and Dentists will once again embrace working solely for the NHS despite the piffling £100-£150K salary they'll have to make do on.

I am interested in your dental oerspective, which dentists are you soecifically referring to?
There are very few salaried NHS dentists, and those that are, generally are fully nhs as they are community based and work on referral. The rest of us are self employed independent contractors. The english terrible system is slightly worse for oatients than the northern ireland terrible system which is slightly worse for dentists, but both are awful in their ways.
We are in general paid for the work we do, not remotely salary related. Do x get paid y. Do x twice get paid y twice.
One of the reasons for not being fully nhs, is the treatments offered are radically limited under the nhs, and frankly if you only offer nhs options to your patient you are not fulfilling your requirements under gdc regulation, where patients must be offered choices. When you need a filling in a back tooth, it can be filled in white or silver usually, it is your choice, if all i do it fill you teeth with mercury silver amalgams offering no alternative where it is available I am in breach of my guidelines that i pay handsomely each year to be struck off under.

I might gross 180k in a year, but the principle, staff, materials, labs etc bring this down considerably. Expenses in dentist are vast, my pretax takehome is still within the sliding scale of child benefit, 55k. Then there is tax and ni to pay in the region of 20k a year.

It isn't comparable with nhs gps, nor locums, which nhs dentists were you referring to? The teaching hospital staff?

 

[wordy]

This is just uninformed rubbish that you're probably finding in the Tory press.

The majority of consultants earn under 100k a year, along will all salaried GPs, all junior doctors, and most locum doctors.

I've been qualified for 9 years and earn under 60k.

GP partners might hit north of 100k, along with a few conatants with clinical excellence awards or those with private practice o top of their NHS work but they are in a minority and all at the top of their areas either clinically or in terms of experience/responsibility.

The reason locums are in the press along with health tourism is because it's a Tory mud flinging exercise to blame the utter disaster that was the NHS this winter on anything but government under funding, poor staffing and cuts.

Great post.

 

[scorza]

£1000 a day for a doctor doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Just think, healthcare tourism costs the country £2bn a year - that would pay for an extra 8,000 locum doctors.

 

[Threepwood]

To hell with saving, we should be spending more.

[bus_sticker]How about we take the billions lost through big buisness tax avoidance and spend it on the NHS[/bus_sticker]

 

[Sliver]

To hell with saving, we should be spending more.

[bus_sticker]How about we take the billions lost through big buisness tax avoidance and spend it on the NHS[/bus_sticker]

In an ideal world we could do that but this is not an ideal world. The wealthy powerful people will fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo and successive governments bend to their will.

 

[Greebo]

£1000 a day for a doctor doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Just think, healthcare tourism costs the country £2bn a year - that would pay for an extra 8,000 locum doctors.

No it doesn't and the biggest majority of the costs is ex-pats anyway. More lies being touted to make your point just like your hero Farage.

 

[Minstadave]

To hell with saving, we should be spending more.

[bus_sticker]How about we take the billions lost through big buisness tax avoidance and spend it on the NHS[/bus_sticker]

I think the Tories are happy running it into the ground to make us more amenable to a slow sell off to private healthcare.

The current campaign is to underfund, demoralise the staff and blame anyone but the government until private health insurance becomes acceptable to the masses.