'Nurses are well paid for the job'

[Letsallscreamatthesistene]

An MP said this today, in responce to the debate surrounding the 1% pay rise. Im a nurse, and I know what I think (that the pay is ok, not terrible but not fantastic), im really interested to know what others think?

I’m Band 6 - top of it and I get London Weighting.
I’ve been nursing for 25 years in London.
I have a diploma - it’s enough in my eyes but yes you do now need a degree.
I got paid to train £5000 per year as we where given bursaries then.
I came from the north!!! My salary in the north of England at that time was £5200.
Once in qualified I felt rich -I was on about £15,000 then.
I have moved up pay scales 4 times.
I can go any higher.
If I lived in the north I’d be well off.
It’s a reasonable salary compared to lots of other jobs and as such makes it hard to leave.
I will retire soon thankfully.
I think I was fortunate to get paid whilst training.
The only mistake I made was not buying a property.
At that time 1997 you could get a terrace house in Bolton for £17,000.
I was shocked when I came here!!! Similar properties about £60,000.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. 😀

@HappydaysArehere

To correct something said above, these days nurses are required to have a degree.

NEW nurses you mean. Not already qualified nurses surely. They're not being sacked are they?

savethewhale 'We want more nurses there is many hcas that would jump over to become a nurse but poor grades and having to go back to college for over a year before even stepping foot inside a university to train is what puts them off.'

And so it bloody should!

I want to be a neurosurgeon, but my inability is standing in my way. Making me get 3 or 4 A* A levels, fight my way into med school, fight my way onto a traineeship, pay thousands of pounds in exam fees, work all god's hours for a decade to get there- that puts me off!

So unfair!

You appear to be assuming 'poor grades' are always, in our 'victimhood' culture, the result of pure bad luck, not inability.

I admit, in my HCP field, I am aghast at some of my fellow HCA workers getting into uni on a cobble-together of level 2 qualifications. It is in the interests if the colleges to admit, and 'pass' these students, and the unis to admit and 'pass' them as HCPs.

With a government turning a blind eye because it is in their interests to Just Get Bums On (HCP) Seats.

I am supportive of staff wanting to get ahead. It's great that there are avenues other than A levels to go down. But god, shouldn't they include some academic rigour?

@nursesdeservefarmore

The salary in relation to the actual job role and duties, is awful.

Working short staffed most shifts. Not because of staff sickness but because the ward budget doesn't allow it.

So there could easily be a team of 2 nurses and a nursing assistant to 15-20 patients (2 teams on a ward of 30-40 patients).

One nurse's duty at start of shift is to do the drug round for their patients, plus blood pressure etc for them all. The other nurse is on the ward round, so "off the floor" so to speak.

The NA is busy trying to help people wash, dress, get out of bed, change the beds and hand out breakfast, help feed patients. Impossible task for 1 person, very difficult even for 2 and very time consuming.

By the time the 2 nurses have finished what they're doing, they all pitch in with the NA duties.

By the time that's done, it's another drug round and observations for one nurse. Second nurse is trying to write up notes from ward round. NA is handing out lunch, helping feed, taking patients to toilet.

After nurses duties are done, they pitch in with the NA. And repeat, for 12 hours.

All well and good. But what if a patient is crying out in pain and needs morphine? Takes 2 nurses off the floor to get from controlled drug cupboard, count the drugs, sign through book, both witness being given. If a patient is violent? Cardiac arrest? New patient admitted? CT scan needing arranged? Patient vomiting? Patient falls? Each one of these things (and most of them happen multiple times on a shift) takes a member of staff away from the team for a while. And the paperwork involved with this!!!

Then there's phone calls from relatives. Countless calls, some taking 5+ minutes.

It's constant, absolutely constant.

I worked on a surgical receiving ward as a newly qualified nurse, and my feet didn't hit the ground for 2 years. I quite literally ran from one end of the ward to another as there just wasn't time to walk. My stress levels were through the roof, and I'd leave every shift upset because I didn't feel that I have my patients the standard of care they deserved. I done everything that needed doing. But I had no time to chat with them, properly reassure them or build a rapport.

I'm now in the private sector in occupational health, 15 years qualified, and earn £35k for practically no stress at all. 3x 12hr shifts a week.

I'm absolutely furious at how the NHS nurses are treated and disrespected. I lost count of how many times we saved a junior doctor's ass, and helped them work out drug calculations. I even had to tell a junior doctor what the standard dose of paracetamol was. And don't get me started on how many times a doctor / physio etc will shout you in to the room because the patient has vomited / spilled a drink then walk out without even so much as handing you a tissue

I could go on and on. But to answer the OPs question....no, nurses are not paid enough for the job they do. Certainly not newly qualified.

I feel your pain. Once I was on night shift 2 of us trained one untrained bank staff. 23 patients. Id finished doling out my oral meds and went to the clinical room to start making up IVs. Bank nurse came to get me saying there was an incident.

Went back into the ward. A patient had ,( for no visible reason) fallen out of bed, hit her head off the locker. She was out cold and there was blood everywhere. Myself and the other trained nurse were doing what we could till the Dr arrived. And this patient's mother comes over saying her daughter needed her pillow case changed urgently. She kept just hanging around repeating it. I've no idea how I kept my cool with her that night.

Then when you're in red or winter alert and bed management or the unit manager says only 2 admissions a day. The consultants appear and x y and z need in. They can't go to a different ward as we were a specialist area. Next day bed management appear and have a go at you. I felt like giving them my admission clipboard and make her do a few days on the ward to see if it changed her perspective....

I think nurses get a really rough end of the deal - I think Band 5 is far too low for nurses, especially when newly qualifieds can be running large wards. Saying that, AHP salaries are appalling, I have an MSc and 5 years experience and I'm on a Band 4 :(

Im a nurse, changed job to a different nurse role in a different trust and they put me back to the bottom of band 5 again.

Yea they are well paid , you only need average A level results to start a nursing degree. Yes most nurses work extremely paid but high paying jobs are paid to those with a unique skill set.

*extremely hard

I think it depends on the specialty and level of training. There are some very well paid nursing jobs and others not so good.

Funny I've only got a diploma and work on the wards as have many nurses I know . I've been qualified 15 years. What annoys me is the rise every year in mmc fees

What is MMC? Modernising Medical Careers?

I expect you are SRN, Joy, which nurses used to be before nursing involved a degree. It is equal to a nursing degree. Or you could be SEN which no longer exists, replaced by HCA.

I liken this to childcare tbh. People balk at paying £80 odd per day to look after their most precious things. I get paid a lot more with no life or death responsibilities.

I think all caring professions are underpaid, if I was to need care of any description I'd rather it was well remunerated. Care on any level shouldn't be seen as a vocation which basically translates to crap money because you have a desire to do it.

yes, I would happily pay more tax to support it. Husband is a teacher and imo on a day to day level paid better than nurses.

Sorry was nightshift when I typed the nmc nursing and midwifery council we have to pay a fee each year to keep us in the register .
We had the option of doing an extra 2 essays to get the degree which you did in the diploma year but you had to pass everything in 1 stv year for this option I had to resist an exam so was unable to do the degree , in all honesty it's never held me back . I get as good a pay as other degree nurses but that's down to experience

1st not stv

My wife is a nurse, she spent 4 years in her own country at uni for her nursing degree!

She then moved to the UK and quickly moved up to a band 6, after 2 years being a band 6 she was offered a nurse practitioner role but had to complete a further 3 years of uni!

She is fully qualified and is earning 53k a year, but has alot of responsibility, she has also been nominated to be on board of governors but is unsure if she will get any more pay from this, she has managed all this before 32

Think the salery is absolutely fine.

OMG- are you having a laugh?! I am a nurse with a degree, a midwife, a prescriber and sonographer. Its insulting that nurses aren’t paid for their skills or even on a par with teachers. I deeply regret my career choice- not that I don’t love my job but why shouldn’t we get paid a decent salary? because we are predominantly female? is that a good wage for a male for instance? nope!!! Very few careers have literally life or death in their hands yet somehow a career for example in HR commands a salary of double what a nurse earns.

I'm less than impressed that new teachers will start on 30K. I've been a band five for 19 years. (Hated being a 6, so stepped down). And I'm only in £32k.

Nurses are paid fairly. There pay goes up quite a lot compared to many jobs where you have to compete with others to gain promotion to get a pay rise.

Nurses in the UK are poorly paid compared to other developed counties like the USA, Canada and Australia. I am in Australia and work four days a week (32 hours) in an outpatient setting and get paid £38k. I am the middle of the equivalent of band 5. I feel like my work is fairly paid.

If I had no choice but to work on the wards again I would leave nursing. I worked 32 hours a week but did shift work and earned £45k. The work is so physically demanding and stressful that even nurses who start out with the best of intentions to help people end up inpatient and burnt out.

Then how do you explain the huge, huge shortage of nurses we have?

If increasingly few people are willing to do the job for that amount of money, then it indicates a problem.