Junior Doctors Strikes

[Tom_ed1987]

I think the pay is (generally) fine, assuming it keeps up with inflation, even if delayed. Seems to be the working conditions/demands on staff that are the real issue. The ones that I feel for are those that are say late 20s/early 30s, mountain of debt, out of hours working/high demands, wanting to start a family etc, which is basically impossible.
Problem is, nobody dare suggest the NHS be properly reformed, because it's become akin to criticizing somebodies religion.

 

[NVP]

This is a dubious way of thinking about JDs. I was still a "Junior doctor" after 6 years uni and 10 years of training. I would run a neonatal intensive care or cardiac critical care with minimal supervision for several of those later years.

I'm still learning and training as a consultant.

It's not dubious at all, it's completely accurate. Perhaps if I included the word "qualified" in addition to being in clinical training it would be even more accurate, but the statement is true.

Perhaps you're ignoring the context of my post re: train drivers v jnr drs... the train driver is at the top of his specific progression ladder.

 

[Minstadave]

I think the pay is (generally) fine, assuming it keeps up with inflation, even if delayed.

Real terms pay for doctors has been falling for a decade even before inflation went crazy:

Chart of the week: Pay has fallen in real terms for most NHS staff groups since 2010

Strike action is affecting a number of sectors across the UK this month, including within the NHS. With widespread discontent over pay and conditions, Lucina Rolewicz, Mark Dayan and Billy Palmer have expanded on our previous staff pay analysis to include other NHS staff groups.

www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk

I don't think there'd be any fuss if pay kept in line with inflation. It would need a roughly 15-20% payrise to achieve pay restoration (which is the same as the nurses asked for) to achieve this.

 

[Mesai]

I support any of the NHS care workers (doctors, nurses, ambulance etc) getting more pay. They do an invaluable job.

But train drivers you can **** off and get another job. They should be automated by now. We really don't need drivers, especially those on so much money.

100% that doctors should be paid more than train drivers - even the most junior of doctor as it's a very different skill ceiling.

I completely agree on train automation, but there are a lot of legal loopholes to jump through. That aside, I don't necessarily think it's about train drivers being paid too much, but more that medical should be better funded.

It's not like there isn't money for these things; so much is wasted on useless BS and corruption.

 

[Mr Jack]

Real terms pay for doctors has been falling for a decade even before inflation went crazy:

Chart of the week: Pay has fallen in real terms for most NHS staff groups since 2010

Strike action is affecting a number of sectors across the UK this month, including within the NHS. With widespread discontent over pay and conditions, Lucina Rolewicz, Mark Dayan and Billy Palmer have expanded on our previous staff pay analysis to include other NHS staff groups.

www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk

Really shows the extent to which these strikes are a delayed reaction to the disaster of the Cameron/Osbourne/Clegg era.

 

[Efour]

I guess the UK just going to have to raise income tax by 5% to pay for all this. You want the services you have to pay right?

 

[fez]

Haven't most peoples wages taken a real terms pay cut over the past 20 years? Unfortunately we have a bit of a mess of a country and giving everyone in the public sector a stoking payrise isn't feasible. People underestimate just how many people are working for the public sector. The extra tax burden and increase in costs to so many things would be a mess.

Its basically a 5th of the entire workforce that are public sector. You also can't do a straight comparison with private sector as the public sector usually has different perks. Teachers for example only work 3 months of the year

When it comes to the NHS, the biggest issue isn't necessarily pay, its understaffing, that would take years to fix though.

 

[SpellowHouse]

All wage increases are at total odds with the current governments obsession with keeping taxes low. The government is forever spending money it doesn't have and that's the first change that needs to be made. Thatcher, who most tories seem to idolise, in fact hugely increased taxes to fix the economy.

 

[Hades]

I guess he UK just going to have to raise income tax by 5% to pay for all this. You want the services you have to pay right?

Which is great and one possible solution. But almost everyone else has also had a massive real time wages cut over a similar period. Many will struggle to afford it.

 

[bigmike20vt]

When it comes to the NHS, the biggest issue isn't necessarily pay, its understaffing, that would take years to fix though.

totally agree with this. no idea how to fix it in the short to medium term however.

(TLDR imo we are in trouble)

long version

imo in general no job should demand more than let's say for arguments sake 40 hrs a week.

IF a job is expecting more than that then the answer isn't to increase salaries to the point that an employee will suck it up. it is to employ more staff.

the problem as I see it is this has been a problem coming for the last decade or more and it's not like the job centre can just advertise for 10 doctors in every town and take 10 random people from the unemployment queue . .

the list of where things ARE working is shorter than where things are not, right from the state of our roads through to the state of our healthcare.

somewhere along the way more taxes will have to cover it...but frankly I would not trust the current lot to spend any extra money wisely even if they had it.

not saying labour would be any better either but in this instance for me it's better the devil I *don't* know.

 

[G J]

Society plays a part in this when it comes to doctors as with lawyers as well as some other professions that people think they all make megabucks.

The we dont have the money thing is strange as our current PM was happy for money printer go brrr during covid.

 

[fez]

totally agree with this. no idea how to fix it in the short to medium term however.

Its not the hours that public sector people are working, as far as I know, most of the staff at my partners hospital aren't working overtime much. Its the fact that its just non stop stress, its not being able to do your job because you don't have time. Its not being able to care for patients properly because you don't have time. Not being able to discharge people quickly because you don't have time. Spending the time you do have covering for things that should be someone elses job. My partner is very senior and the amount of stuff she ends up doing that should be done by someone about 5 bands lower is silly. The amount of time she spends compensating for a lack of staff is silly.

The other thing that the NHS and probably all public sector needs to fix is giving their staff the tools to be efficient. **** chairs, **** desks, tiny monitors that wouldn't have been considered decent 10 years ago and only one monitor to do work that should be done on 2 large ones. You pay someone £70k/year and sit them on a workstation that gives them a bad back and make them work on a **** laptop and a 17" monitor that should have been binned years ago. I reckon that they might lose 20-30% productivity from the staff they do have from equipping them poorly.

 

[tamzzy]

IIRC a Nurse starts on £20.2k to 54k for a consultant nurse, there are other positions that pay more but aren't strictly nursing (they seem very specialised?). My Mum was a nurse for 30+ years and she certainly never earnt close to what a Doctor with the same amount of experience would.


A JD would start at £29.3k, or about 45% more than a nurse. You can't really compare an "average" nurse salary to that of a first year doctor.

No. A band 5 nurse at the bottom of the band (ie fresh nurse out of uni) starts at £27k for a 37.5h week
So per- hour, nurse v doctor (both fresh from uni) the nurse actually earns more.

 

[tamzzy]

ah you are good then.

My barrister charges 3 months of take home pay of a ST3 for a single day in court.

Yeah. I have calculated if I drop my hours from 54h a week as a trainee, and go full time locum and do 2 long shifts a week (25h - ie more than halve my clinical hours)
I would earn more money (2.5k/mth extra) and have a heck ton more free time out of medicine. And can do more shifts for more £££ if I really wanted to.
And still pay into the pension.
Win-win really. Being a consultant is not all that's cracked up to be.

 

[fez]

Yeah. I have calculated if I drop my hours from 54h a week as a trainee, and go full time locum and do 2 long shifts a week (25h - ie more than halve my clinical hours)
I would earn more money (2.5k/mth extra) and have a heck ton more free time out of medicine. And can do more shifts for more £££ if I really wanted to.
And still pay into the pension.
Win-win really. Being a consultant is not all that's cracked up to be.

And this is the issue. The NHS has to have staff. Normally there is a balance between the need for locums and the full time staff so locums get paid a bit extra for obvious reasons but there are trade offs. The staffing has got so bad that more and more people are realising that they could quit their full time job, go locum, work less, work when and where they want and get paid more.

This is 100% on the government for letting it get to this stage. The fact that they could employ 2 people for the same amount of money as one locum is stupidity of the highest order.

 

[tamzzy]

This is 100% on the government for letting it get to this stage. The fact that they could employ 2 people for the same amount of money as one locum is stupidity of the highest order.

More than 2

3

Absolutely absurd seeing as there is always a locum on shift
It used to be that locums get paid extra because there was no job security. Nowadays there are so many gaps in the rota that job security isn't an issue

 

[ArcticHeron]

When it comes to the NHS, the biggest issue isn't necessarily pay, its understaffing, that would take years to fix though

Pay increases would help a great deal in this regard though. I've worked in a Maternity unit for 10 years now and the biggest issue by far is staff retention. Midwives simply aren't being paid enough at the lower bandings to want to stay there. They either climb the ladder or leave. It's the the same with Admin. The pay jump between band 2 and 3 is pathetic and you'll be lucky if you ever get a peak at a Band 4. Forget progressing past there. Band 5 admin in the NHS is almost unheard of.

It's not just sitting at a desk with a little filing anymore, admin jobs can take a hellishly long time to warm into and each role is often specialist with a great deal of pressure. Why would anyone want to stay in a role that has a burn out rate as high as any other banding for what basically amounts to a living wage?

 

[Werewolf]

This may really bite them in the arse. I would be pushing to get this defined because I doubt we're meeting it at the moment even without strikes.

That's pretty much my thought, and a couple of friends have made similar comments.

The government won't define it though, just leave it down to the ministers discretion or something similarly vague.

I was watching PMQ's yesterday (and holding in the urge to call the government ministers various rude words), when they kept deflecting on service levels and blaming the "strikes" for things like ambulances taking an hours to arrive at cat 1/2 calls as they pretended that this wasn't happening on a fairly regular basis several years ago, and it's only gotten worse as more and more ambulances have got tied up outside hospitals due to staff shortages over the last few years.

I find it quite depressing at times how few of the hard won lessons about staff exhaustion/rest periods that have been applied in other fields where lives are at risk due to poor decision making caused by lack of rest have been applied to the medical field because apparently no one in power/the press cares about the fact that extremely preventable mistakes are being made and the underlying human issues are extremely well known and understood. We don't let an airline pilot fly when they've only had a few hours rest after a 12+ hour flight, we certainly don't expect them to do it for weeks on end even in the Military (and the rules about it are set in stone), so why is it acceptable for medical staff to face those conditions.

 

[fez]

Pay increases would help a great deal in this regard though. I've worked in a Maternity unit for 10 years now and the biggest issue by far is staff retention. Midwives simply aren't being paid enough at the lower bandings to want to stay there. They either climb the ladder or leave. It's the the same with Admin. The pay jump between band 2 and 3 is pathetic and you'll be lucky if you ever get a peak at a Band 4. Forget progressing past there. Band 5 admin in the NHS is almost unheard of.

It's not just sitting at a desk with a little filing anymore, admin jobs can take a hellishly long time to warm into and each role is often specialist with a great deal of pressure. Why would anyone want to stay in a role that has a burn out rate as high as any other banding for what basically amounts to a living wage?

Increasing pay is unlikely to ever put someone off a job but you have to consider the knock-on effect of these things. If one band gets a 10% increase it will make the next bad need the same and so on. Its a complicated thing to fix without absolutely killing the budget. If a job is super stressful its often because you are overloaded with work and increasing the number of staff helps a lot with that.

Depends on how skilled work is as well and what someone with that skillset could get elsewhere. All needs to be balanced.

 

[Werewolf]

More than 2

3

Absolutely absurd seeing as there is always a locum on shift
It used to be that locums get paid extra because there was no job security. Nowadays there are so many gaps in the rota that job security isn't an issue

unfortunately it's the same in some businesses as well, my brother in law works in a factory where they'll quite happily pay for untrained "temp" staff at a higher hourly cost than the trained staff, every day, and will frequently pay overtime to get the trained staff to work extra shifts, but they won't increase the base pay a bit to encourage more permanent staff to stay when they know they can go and get a job in a safer, more comfortable, easier and more sociable job and at best lose a few percent of their wage (brother in law looked and worked out he'd probably be better off, one of the main reasons he's staying is they're talking about possible redundancies and he's got ~25 years there).