Goodbye NHS

[Madwife123]

Well Rishi and his party have finally managed to kill the NHS it seems.

From April 2023 a band 5 nurse will earn £3.42 an hour above the new minimum wage.

Out of that £3.42 they are paying student loans, NMC fee, work parking permit. Costs they would not have if they never went to uni and instead went straight into a minimum wage job.

Young people wanting to be nurses are now financially better off going to work in Tesco instead.

It’s frankly an insult to how hard they work and the responsibility they have to say there is no money for an NHS pay rise and then raise benefits and pension by 10%. Where is that money coming from? If you paid them fairly in the first place they wouldn’t be relying on top up benefits!

This is really going to help the staffing crisis! I expect nurses will be leaving in their masses come next year and the Tory’s will finally get what they always wanted.

@indiepins in my Trust our Band 2s and Band 3s absolutely do save lives as part of the clinical team caring for the patient. Counting down the days until I'm out; I doubt my energy company will accept my rainbow badge as payment for winter. Last 18 months to go.

@indiepins disgusting comment! You know full well that band 2's and 3's have a very broad scope of job roles. They're not all HCA's. ANY role that has to take mandatory BLS & PBLS yearly, are expected to be able to save lives when needed. Is it no wonder the general public has such distain for NHS workers when your own colleagues are happy to put you down.

Are you a nurse? Your lack of respect is astonishing. HCA record obs and escaulate to the nurse any sign of deterioration is flagged by the HCA in the early stages because half the time the nurses barely know their 14 patients........ Oh and your wage isn't really that much higher than a band 3 depending on what unsocial hours you do!

@Flowersonthewall6 it's tricky to make the call as to how much we think we are worth , but I will give you a perfectly normal scenario that I face in my average working day.

We get a referral from someone, could be a GP, could be the specialist palliative team, could be carers, could be the patient themselves. They are palliative and things have taken a turn for the worse. As a Band 5 I will be sent to assess the patient on my own, I will try to work out what is happening, is this something new and reversible or something related to the natural disease process ? I then need to figure out what that person needs, what medications are going to relieve their symptoms. Are they taking things orally, do they have a pain patch etc, if they are, I need to work out what is the safe level of pain relief they need. I then contact the GP or the OOH GP and explain the situation and ask them to prescribe the medications needed. Quite often this means driving to the local GP practice or hospital to get the chart and prescription needed to give the medications. At no point does the GP see the patient, they rely on my experience and assessment/explanation of the situation and they prescribe the required medications, because they trust my assessment/explanation.

I get a grand total of 32k for that level of responsibility with 20 years experience. I personally think closer to 40k would be fair. You might disagree ?

@Madwife123 you do know that not everyone who goes straight into work at 18 without a degree isn’t on NMW, yes? The most successful people I know didn’t go to university. I’m sure people don’t enter nursing for the money.

That's appalling. How has this been justified?

It’s not just NHS. Look at all local authorities, universities etc. Those at the bottom get topped up but those in the middle, above them, don’t. So there’s now something like a £10K differential between a new starter, fresh from school on an apprenticeship and an experienced middle management salary. What’s the fucking point?

A HCA saved my sons life when he was born. The midwives on the ward were too busy and wee telling me I was a paranoid first time mum, it was a HCA that finally responded to me frantically calling out that he wasn’t breathing and came to check him and raised the alarm. They absolutely do save lives, what an awful thing to say.

wasn’t breathing normally*.

Exactly. We need this back.

mum was in hospital not ten days ago. The nurses are doing an amazing job in awful conditions. Who on earth would want to train as a nurse now?

I find comments about the pension puzzling too. It's not enough to offer that. Meanwhile people like the Chief Exec of the NHS Confederation, with no practical experience, get paid a fortune to help more strategists get paid a fortune.

HCAs are also fab. Ditto paramedics.

HCA's are fab and DO save lives, as a RN I would sometimes rather have an experienced HCA with me than another nurse, our HCA's take blood/cannulate/do bladder scans/post op obs/blood glucose etc. HCA are expected to understand the values and alert nurses, experienced HCA's are worth their weight in gold, vastly underpaid.

It hard to put an amount on nurse wages, I think the banding makes it difficult, some nurses prescribe, carry out minor surgery & endoscopy's. Nurse specialists guide the doctors on treatment plans, our outreach nurses are called to every sick or deteriorating patients, they start life saving interventions and are often more competent than the doctors, they tend to be band 6 with one band 7 leading them, so max out at £40k.
Then top band 5's take charge of the wards and monitor and treat sick patients among many other things.

Nurses are independent practitioner's with lots of knowledge and skill.

Wrt pensions (also known as golden handcuffs) the conditions have been continuously eroded. This was the thing that kept me in the NHS but it's not worth it anymore when you consider the stress/working conditions of the job.

I'll tell that to the person I was performing CPR on today.

The remark about police training being free just raises the question of why there are no differentials in degree costs depending on skills demand. James Dyson is always complaining he can’t find engineers, so why do we make it as expensive to study engineering as we do to study philosophy? For essential public service roles such as nurses, we shouldn’t be charging fees at all. In fact I don’t think we should be charging for doctors either as long as they commit to working for a certain number of years in the NHS system instead of buggering off to Australia as soon as they can after finishing training. We have to provide incentives for people to acquire the skills we can’t do without and charging those studying such skills through the nose for fees is simply ridiculous.

Please, everyone needs to write to their MPs about this, especially if they have a Tory one. Even if you think it won’t make a difference, it will as they’ll start to worry about elections.

Paying nurses more needs to happen regardless of whether the NHS is privatised or not.

Why do you think engineering degrees are worth more?

and why, pray tell, doesn’t Dyson train its own staff to some degree….

Regards a private mental health service, I agree it will happen. But mental health issues are reaching pandemic proportions. Won't be long before there are attacks on the streets. We can thank the Tories for all of this!

While I do think nurses should be paid more, anyone who is a nurse what do you think the salary banding should be? What’s the expectation within the workforce? Just curious.

One thing I would like to bring up is the idea that anyone on Band 5 isn't an experienced nurse. I am band 5 and have 20 years of experience, as do a hell of a lot of my colleagues. Most band 5 nurses are experienced nurses. A lot of my band 6 counterparts have a lot less years of experience. What I would like to see is either more truly clinical band 6 roles, because not everyone is interested in a mangement pathway, or additional levels to band 5 depending on experience and clinical skills.