To think the junior / resident doctors are greedy, selfish, entitled & lazy?

@SpecklyYou think teachers and doctors are on the breadline? None earn minimum wage! All have brilliant scope for earning a lot more. Resident doctors get overtime ffs! None are badly paid. I would suggest too many like the idea of the job but don’t like the challenges of the children or the challenges of the nhs. All of which are known about in advance. What do they all have in common? State employees that hold us all to ransom whilst others pay their taxes to fund them. Whilst I’m commenting, many other professionals have a lengthy training too and won’t earn what a consultant earns! And certainly won’t get the holidays teachers get! Nowhere near!

Why do doctors in training need a 23.7% pension contribution from the NHS /taxpayers early in their careers? Cut the employer pension contribution for younger doctors and pay them a higher salary - if they are still working for the NHS in 10 years time, increase the employer pension contribution. Would that work?

There are a lot of issues with the NHS & public expectations. Experts warned decades ago that we had an aging population and health & social care was a ticking time bomb. Newsflash - the population had now aged, the bomb's gone off and still politicians are pretending they don't know what the problem is. Older adults often have multiple co-morbidities and their care is very expensive. This is not complicated.

Waiting lists for surgery maybe long because of a lack of consultants but for most common stuff (cataracts, hips, knees) it's more likely to be the lack of theatre space, theatre staff, post-op beds etc. If the hospital is full to the brim with elderly people waiting for social care then elective surgery gets cancelled because there is nowhere for you to go post-op. Ditto for high risk surgery where an ITU or HDU bed is needed post-op - people often stay there longer than needed when ward fit as no ward bed available. If we fixed social care the NHS would be in a much better state. But fundamentally the wheels came off due to our increasingly elderly population and ever increasing public demand.

No, it really isn’t. Wannabe doctors apply to medical school. If they get in they study medicine. If they pass they become doctors and work for the NHS (or as GPs).

They don’t rise out of the ground like deities cast upon us.

Lots of applicants don’t get into medical school and go and do biomedical sciences in the hope they can get in to medicine later. Or they become pharmacists.

Aspiring doctors are not rare. Some make it, some don’t. But they don’t do it selflessly. Ultimately it’s an industry like any other. Even if the job is socially valuable.

Greedy. And this will also create a knock on uplift in pay bands of consultants.

Well hold onto your hats because teachers are likely to strike again soon too. Why should any of them live on the breadline when they’ve trained so hard and do such a great job!
Most other countries value their professionals so much more! Long story short… people wonder why there are retention crisis’ in these fields 🤷🏻‍♀️

Did Florence Nightingale ever go on strike and demand more money or fewer hours?

"no guaranteed specialist training posts - why should they be guaranteed a training post."

because they need them??

"It would help focus on those with a true vocation."

This is quite a toxic thing to say/think. A true vocation doesn't mean being willing to be paid peanuts, even during training.

This is pie in the sky though. How are people supposed to be carers for their parents when they need to work and be earning themselves? We just don’t live like that anymore. And more and more people are living longer but not necessarily healthily.

Amazing these idiots airily saying “they knew what the pay was like when they started training! Why did they go into the profession?” As if doctors are some kind of frippery, a luxury that society doesn’t need. Just mind bogglingly ignorant.

no guaranteed specialist training posts - why should they be guaranteed a training post. Competition is good and drives innovation and improved care, new discoveries etc

This is not a good way to evolve the development of specialists.

There is a lot of rubbish being spouted on here which just is not true and I do nto agree with the strikes

Only people who have not worked with NHS resident doctors would call then lazy.

Only people who aren't resident doctors, were never resident doctors, have no family or friends as resident doctors would call them greedy, selfish and entitled.

People are always so happy to comment with 'facts' and run down resident doctors when in fact they do not know it all.

I fully support them.

Me, I support them. They want a proper salary. Fair enough.

Many consultants I know are in the thick of childcare years.

I’ve been looking at the pay information previous posters have provided. Can anyone tell me, after FY1 & FY2, how do the resident doctors progress up the pay scales, CT1 to CY2 for instance? Is it automatic each year? Or is it performance based? Or something else?

I hate to say it but the NHS is the biggest money pit this country has and yet the services only get worse year by year. I’ve had the misfortune via my son to see the war zone that is A&E several times and the poor excuse for care. Patients left in agony and neglected whilst staff chat and laugh. You never see anyone rushing about and try and get someone from any outpatient department on a Friday - they all work part-time. We have a third world health system and it’s time we admitted it.

That’s except the Resident Doctors. They are the backbone of NHS medical expertise and are exploited by their colleagues. Senior Consultants and Surgeons are all working privately 3 days a week which is the real reason waiting lists are so high, and the poor resident doctors are the ones left to deal with patients having no choice but to turn up to A&E to wait 10 hours plus and if they’re really poorly on a trolley in a corridor.

Meanwhile hospital managers earn upwards of £100k plus. The entire system needs a root and branch restructure but of course that won’t happen. We’ll just get more and more apologies and enquiries that produce recommendations which are never acted upon and no accountability or consequences.

I have private medical insurance because I don’t trust the NHS to be there for me when I need it. But I can’t get private A&E - if I could I would, not least for my terminally ill
son.

Wes Streeting needs to get on with his reforms asap. A good start would be to get rid of doctors tuition fees in return for a 10 year employment contract in the NHS because believe it or not there are too many applicants for each job - bonkers.

Rant over (sorry) 😞

No one’s public sector pay has kept up and I do not know why the doctors are more special than the other jobs/roles. You do not hear from the nurses. I work for the CS and remember the years of a 1% pay rise 🫣

This!
I find it such a pathetic attempt to patronise public sector workers when people come out with “and my taxes pay your wages” about anything and anyone who doesn’t do what they want or has their shared view/opinion.
Do people understand how the economy works? It’s not one-sided with the public sector ‘taking’ and the private sector ‘giving’.
If a doctor goes into a cafe (if they have half a chance) they will be paying their already tax-deducted income to buy a sandwich and coffee, which goes towards the cafe owner and staff wages, and sustaining that business. The cafe owner will have to pay their suppliers, and so on. Likewise if the doctor put petrol in their car to drive to work, they will be ‘paying’ the wages of those all those in that supply chain…

All that said, I think this strike is unnecessary and reflects poorly on the BMA. Resident doctors absolutely deserve a decent start salary and progression. But they’ve had a substantial increase (rightly so) in recent years, and the country (and world) are in a very challenged position mostly due to the orange warmonger, so we need to cut our cloth accordingly in terms of appropriate and fair pay awards. It’s not feasible or reasonable to keep referring back to 2008 pay freezes as something we need to up pay for to recognise something that wasn’t paid almost 20 years ago - those were sh!t times globally too, just for different reasons.

Enjoy tons of unnecessary investigations and exponential waiting lists as everyone is scanned and tested for everything, preventing those who need X accessing it.

That's the future of the NHS when it has ANPs/ ASPs/whatever new acronym the NHS has made made up delivering 'healthcare'.

Whatever it is, it isn't medicine.

Consultants are more often than not beyond childcare years.

It's not a racket. It's the marginal tax bracket effect, and the childcare hours.
This puts the brakes on the amount of NHS hours, as only an idiot would work more to get less.

I fully support them. How can we say £35k / £18 per hour is a fair salary when we pay happily circa £40-£60 an hour for a tradesman.

The starting salary for a teacher in Scotland is very similar to a Junior Doctor, and teachers, despite having a very important job, have a lot less responsibility, work less hours and have more annual leave. In addition some Advanced Nurse Practitioners, Physicians Associates and nurses can earn more than the junior doctors ( and nurses have no student debt as they receive a bursary in Scotland). And to add insult to injury there is then a shortage of speciality training places after their foundation years. It’s no wonder they’re all jumping ship to Australia where they’re valued and have much better working conditions. If the NHS doesn’t sit up and listen and pay them a decent starting salary commensurate with the responsibility of the job it’s only going to get a lot worse.

You forgot arrogant and undereducated.

Being a Dr takes years of study, student debt, an inability to work while studying due to placements.

They then do long hours and have more expectations and patients for comparably less money. Significantly less.

I feel the same about my job, but some jobs are more important than others. Id worry more not about medicine being a less attractive career or further privatisation. We may pay for their pay rises, but its better than the American situation.