Reasonable to expect a surgeon to do this?

Simple- their wives do the labour for free

Anyone can say they are a consultant on an anonymous online forum.

I beggars belief that £93k+ per year is such a low wage that a consultant doctor can’t afford to fund their 50% share towards childcare costs- a grand total of £600/mo out of £1,200/mo for a PT live out nanny.

It is triple the average wage and is in the top 3% in income.
How do you think the other 97% of U.K. earners manage?

It's the arrogance and ignorance of some posters that is so wrong and frankly disconcerting. They are so convinced of something they have (mis)read online to the point where they think they can argue with people who are actually doing the job. It's a theme throughout the country sadly, people cannot or will not correctly interpret the information in front of them, continue to believe bogus information and the country just deteriorates on a daily basis.

I think Ibis might be confusing a bonus with a clinical excellence award. A CEA is sometimes/ rarely awarded to a consultant who carries out a large (unpaid) project or piece of work outside their contracted hours. This might be a teaching or research programme.
It is not an annual bonus for doing your normal work.

Not read the whole thread, but many of the comments I’ve seen are so infuriating. There’s so much misinformation and assumption about what consultants actually earn. DH is a (fairly junior) consultant and we’ve had so many comments along the lines of “Why do you drive that [shit] car when you have his salary” or “surely you’ll be sending your kids to [nearby private school]”. While we’re not on the breadline, so many people clearly think he earns waaaaaay more than he actually does!!

In terms of taking time off at the last minute for poorly children it can be quite hard. He has three days a week where he really can’t take time off, but has two days where he can be a bit more flexible e.g. take the morning off then work late into the night…unless those days happen to be when his on calls fall, then it can be harder again. The way we do it, and I appreciate this may be harder to get an ex-husband to do, is he will take annual leave on the days when I have to be away for work / know in advance that I’m going to have a load of important meetings etc. That way he can do the various drop offs and pick-ups, but also be on standby if a child needs to come home. He also uses annual leave to take a week or two in the main school holidays and I use that time to work some very long days to try and get ahead! In short though, it’s really not easy to juggle.

Idiotic to the highest level.
you are not a consultant, you are disagreeing with all of us who are.

Who cba arguing with stupid.

ignoramus.

you do know that anyone can put money tax-free into a pension

Yes.

you do know that anyone can put money tax-free into a pension - up to the (now) annual allowance of £60k p/a - how does the fact that a consultant has no choice but to do that mean that someone who has a choice is worse off?

And if your heart is bleeding - would you like a consultant to fix that?! 😁

It always amazes me the number of people with no clue who post online as though their imaginings are fact - and then you get a whole load of consultants here posting the reality and they are told that they haven't got a clue about what they earn / how much cash they have each month! It takes a special level of arrogance to do that!

As for these mythical multi-thousand bonuses:
To enable these reforms, unions have agreed to end Local Clinical Excellence Awards (LCEAs) going forward.
LCEAs are no more after the recent consultants pay settlement...

There is no doubt that a consultant is not on the poverty line and most consider themselves very fortunate to be paid what they are - however, neither are they wealthy - pay for a newly qualified lawyer in the city of London can be as high as £150,000 - when you consider that a consultant has been continually training for at least 15-20 years, and that they are often making life or death decisions every day, their pay is actually quite low.

As for the OP's original question:

• yes a consultant has flexibility - as much as many other careers / less than some, more than some.
• there are plenty of single-parent consultants, they work out how to manage
• no, a consultant isn't going to vanish from your operation unannounced to attend little Billy's egg and spoon race at sports day, but equally they might need to re-arrange if their child is unwell enough to need a parent
• no, they don't have the money to pay for full time nannies just in case, but yes they can afford some child care.

It doesn't matter how much they are paid. They don't have to. They are employees with full employment rights, including being ill and emergency leave to care for their children.

I don't think anyone would try to claim that hospital Consultants are poor - though my final pay check when I retired was probably worth, in real terms, about 30% less than my first month's pay as a Consultant after 20+ years of service so I do get why current staff are unhappy.
And regarding Clinical Excellence Awards, it's changed since I retired to try to spread the funds out more evenly, so I am a bit out of the loop, but it has always been far more common not to have an award than to do so. It's hard to find any data on local CEAs, especially now that Trusts have a lot more choice aboit how they distribute their share of the pot, but as an example, from my last department of 15, I think 3 of us had awards and all at the lower end. (And certainly not £7.9k) I can't remember the exact figures but I think my CEA meant I took home maybe an extra £40 or £50 a week. Which I am not complaining about, but it was never going to fund a Maserati was it? National awards which are higher value are given to a few hundred of the tens of thousands of eligible doctors a year. Most of us will probably never meet someone who has one of those, never mind get one ourselves. It's anything but an automatic annual bonus for most people and suggesting that doctors who don't have an award are "crap" is incredibly rude.
Personally, I never had any major complaints about my pay and I do have a good pension compared to many. We're very comfortably off compared to lots of and we have a nice house in a good area. I am very grateful for that. But we are not super rich. Of course we could afford childcare, though when I had 2 in nursery full time it did make a substantial dent in my wages.
I don't think anyone is claiming they are on the bread line. But some posters seem to be suggesting that a Consultant could afford to be paying someone to be continually on standby as emergency childcare and it's that which people are objecting to. For context, I could probably count the number of times my children's health affected by attendance at work on the fingers of one hand over my 20 odd year Consultant career and 2 of those were hospital admissions so I don't think I would have let my mythical stand by emergency childcare person take that on anyway.
People are not walking out mid operation because their child has a sniffle - not anywhere I have ever worked anyway and if they did they'd be having some awkward conversations with their Clincal Director - but just like any other employee in any other job, Consultants with families, do on rare occasions have genuine emergencies which require them to leave work. And nobody is going to employ someone "just in case" for things that happen very infrequently. I had more short notice absences to deal with my parents' deaths than for my children's illnesses. Should I have had an on call emergency mourner on my payroll to deal with that for me too?

Bearing in mind how late my consultant can sometimes be for the clinic I attend on occasion, I think he is doing all the drop offs, pick ups and emergency childcare.

But the basic take home is not that high.
if you are a single parent for example two kids in a expensive area ( near a big hospital) the take home is about 5 or maybe 6. Two average workers take home is 4590 for example. You get no help childcare or anything if over £100k. £700 just for parking or commuting costs. Plus you have childcare. Yes you can work earn more in PP or OT but this will come at the expense of ever seeing your children. Yes the pension is good if you don’t die of stress before 67 or when we the gov decides.

I know what the pension contribution rate is. It means that NHS consultants and other highly paid staff effectively have a tax free allowance of £26.25k. With a fabulous pension at the end of their career. My heart bleeds.

Pension contribution are up to 13.5% .
average salary doesn’t meant that much as the increments are very distant in years.

The average NHS consultant salary is £117k. That equates to monthly take home pay of £5751, closer to £70k than £60k. Pension deductions are a red herring as they’re deducted before tax and contribute to one of the most generous pension schemes in existence.

Ridiculous so many ill informed comments. Why do you think consultants have been striking. You forgot all the tax and pension deductions and marginal tax rates. The nhs consultant salary take home after ten years is only £60 K. That is why many work OT and private so obviously results in less time for family life /childcare. You haven’t even mentioned the cost of divorce and moving house etc.

Completely and utterly disagree. A consultant surgeon in NHS earns way more than a paltry 60k

Adding my proof. How are all these consultants on less than the minimum? Are you part timers?

Level 5 earns £105,390 base salary, which is take home of almost £70k
Not including the annual bonus which on average is and extra £7,900

PT childcare at around £1,200/mo is totally affordable. I am shocked you think it is not.

I am shocked you don’t think you are well off.
You make at least 3x the average FT wage.

Where is your proof? Perhaps you were paid that much when you were a newly qualified consultant however many years ago, but it beggars belief that current new consultants are being paid a full £10k/yr less than the minimum base salary listed in the BMA page for NHS consultants.

Just posting “you are wrong” and “I’m a consultant” over and over doesn’t cut the mustard.

I understood the annual bonus btw, it is funded at £7,900 per FTE and then is doled out with top performers getting a lot more, up to £35k and crappy ones getting £0. It’s a use it or lose it funding, so there is always a bonus.

An average consultant is going to get on average around £7,900 per year as a bonus. It’s a useful benchmark for estimating likely total take home pay.

Another consultant here, about to call payroll and ask where my bonuses have been? 😂

So yes, surgeons can and will leave in a childcare emergency, and like any parent when their child is sick, they will get sick themselves , whatever.
Same as any other employee.

Really, what sort of stand by child care?
if surgeon takes home £60k per year ( say if they are 5 years into consultant job), to cover all the costs of professional essentials ( GMC, RCS, MPS, travel), accommodation, food, clothing, how will they fund ‘stand by childcare’?

Of course they can’t afford it. Unless you think the ‘stand by childcare’ should be paid in sandwiches.

Ridiculous.

Habing some stand by childcare, whatever that is, is the remit of the very well off and doctors in this country haven’t been in that club for years.

Erm, I think you are paid enough to have stand by childcare!! Are you kidding!

in knots of laughter at your ‘annual bonus of £7900 minimum for FTE’. Where on earth did you dream this up, hilarious.
She's C&P from the BMA page which includes a section on local CEAs but clearly completely misunderstood it. That line is from the section on how Trusts fund the scheme, not what is paid out.