My payslip as a doctor in Feb 2021 during COVID

[Juniordoc]

See attached image. Yes this is for full-time work with weekends and nights in the currently stretched working conditions that the NHS provides.

This does not include the expenses and sacrifices of a six year medical degree. On top of that, we have to pay out of pocket for our own GMC membership, medical defence union, postgrad exams and revision courses, conferences and courses.

Please get behind us and support the strikes. We are burnout, exhausted and struggling to live

I support you all @Juniordoc . Thank you for sharing, I think it’s really important that people understand what is really happening rather than what the daily fail want people to believe.
As a nurse I’ve seen junior doctors often treated badly from both above and below.
Working to the point of collapse and forfeiting family to be able to do their job.

Good luck

I support the strikes but you can't expect 26% or whatever the exact figure is.
One of the things the government could do to help in the recruitment and retention crisis in medicine and teaching is to say that there will be no student loans to be repaid for any Dr or Teacher who completes their training and signs up to a full-time NHS (UK)DR or state school UK Teacher contract for 10 years afterwards. If they break that contract the whole of their student loan becomes payable.If they give up on their training they repay the loan they've had.

Cleaners get £20 ph near me.

I agree everyone in the world deserves fair pay. What you have shown is not fair pay. Good luck negotiating. I'm behind you and won't vote Conservative.

So top end of scale is circa £58K

You can earn £60K being an Executive Assistant in a big city. My good friend is an EA on £62K (London). She works 9-6 and gets an occasional (once a month) text asking her to do something minor (a single email for example) outside of those hours. At 6pm, she literally shuts her laptop and walks out the door. She's very good. VERY organised, very efficient and her boss expects her to be across lots of things - but the stress is not in the same ballpark as 'saving lives' and working till your eyes bleed.

A tube driver earns £63K. Again - not saying it's easy/stress free. But come on.

I support the strikes, but would support even more if you could punch for a number that might actually happen. Deserved or not, you're not going to get a 35% pay rise.

Spot on.

And those ludicrous posters ( 🦅 and others) will all be using doctors and then complaining about the ‘service’ they receive.

But instead of supporting the fight for safer and better conditions for those keeping us alive, they wear their bitterness and ignorance like a badge of honour. And I bet they misuse services, too.

I was in A&E during my pregnancy with an uncontrolled heavy, heavy bleed. Terrifying. A woman came in with a, and I quote, ‘slightly sore thumb which isn't bending right’. As I was leaving, having been triaged, seen by gynae, scanned, given tea, three biscuits and a cuddle by a nurse, and sent home to watch and wait it out, she marched up to the reception screaming and shouting that I’d been in three times and she hadn’t been seen yet, to be told calmly patients were seen in order of need. She then demanded to know why I was there. Seeing as I was tearful and clutching maternity notes, it was hardly difficult to work out, but hey.

I imagine she wouldn’t back the strikes for better conditions either.

Solidarity, from a fellow union member.

Thanks for showing the payslip my salary is the same as this (the hourly rate) and yes it isn’t very easy to live on. I think 35 percent is a bit steep of a rise to ask for. But the hard work and training etc is definitely worth more than your on an hour now. I hate the way people in medical profession have to pay uni fees etc and car parking it’s a scandal and not how you should be treated.
I really hope they come up with a sensible solution. Maybe cutting admin managers and paperwork and going back to basics might be a way forward so they can increase medical staff wages Just don’t let conservatives take your final salary pension fight for that. What I don’t understand is why footballers get paid more than surgeons - savings lives priceless. My rant over!

OP ain’t replying to this one

I’m not sure if this has been posted elsewhere on this long thread, but it makes it very clear what drs earn.
https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-doctors
Lots of drs work hard. As do other government funded professions-most get paid a lot less than drs and work many more hours. I understand that it is hard for junior drs, but that’s what you signed up to.

That’s outrageous! I’ve got friends with children trying to get in to Uni to study medicine and are having to go through ridiculous hoops all for this! I really hope you get a fair outcome.

Ok, I'll bite. I'm not the op but a junior doctor. I am 10 years post qualifying. My take home is £2767 a month. I have to pay for GMC out of this (over £400 per year), BMA (£40/month), Royal college membership (around £160 a year), parking (no permit available, so about £10 a day if I drive), plus exams (about £800 this year, plus over £1000 on a revision course and materials). All of the above is paid out of my own pocket. I work similar hours to a normal person in a full time job. I also have a very long commute due to having to rotate as part of my training programme.

We're with you!!!

It’s easily googleable. She’s not hiding it because by year five she’ll be on trillions of pounds. She’ll be a junior doctor right up until she specialises as a GP or becomes a consultant. The responsibility is VAST, from a very early stage of qualification. Multiple lives are often in your hands alone in primary care settings. The big financial obligation to take multiple exams each year and complete CPD is relentless. As is the cost of legally-obliged professional registrations, not to mention having to pay to park at the hospital you work in.

It was the case that if you finished nights at 8am, and started work at 8pm the following day, it counted as two rest days. Unbelievable.

The money for the level of responsibility, demanding hours and unsafe working conditions, leading to unsafe practice, not to mention the psychological toll, is huge. And it’s only going to get worse with things as they are. Doctors are leaving the profession in droves. As are clinicians and non-clinical staff at every level in the NHS.

You can thank the conservative government for that. As it will be you, the patient, who bears the full brunt of this.

As OP says, takes minimum 6 years to train a doctor, there aren't enough places to cover the short fall and the staffing levels are so dire that hospitals already can't offer enough F1 spaces for all graduates. Literally people finish their medical degree and can't get an F1 place because the hospital doesn't have the staff hours to allocate to training them.

@Mushroo comparing an accountant to a doctor is like comparing apples and oranges. For that 23k starting salary an accountant beginning a training programme may have just graduated from a geography degree or an engineering degree and will have no business or accounting knowledge at all. I had a slight advantage as I had a business degree but still didn’t know a debit from a credit. Every audit I went on for weeks / months was fully supervised and every piece of work was reviewed.

Compare that to an F1 who has just completed a 6 year medical degree and is already a qualified doctor. In their first shift they may be performing CPR or dealing with a dying patient. Yes they’ll be supervised but that might be a consultant at the end of the phone. The amount of skill and responsibility is in no way comparable. Also, unlike a doctor, all my exams were fully funded and I spent weeks at FTC doing revision course prior to my exams.

How on a thread where everyone is saying how low paid doctors are (and I'll bet most of us do earn a lot more than that payslip) could dissenting posts be rooted in jealousy ?
The old mumsnet chestnut, if someone doesnt agree with me they are jealous!

Every gp I know has left - changed job or left the country. These are highly trained good doctors that we will all need and the Uk has lost them. People wouldn’t be leaving the country/changing jobs if there is not something seriously wrong here. I can think of 20 doctors who in the last 2 years have fully exited the NHS.

It’s not ok to be paid peanuts and then also expect to work 3 hours overtime regularly / work 12 hour night shifts/work weekends / make life and death decisions (yes fy1 out of med school does this)/ miss out on Xmas coz your working/ get messed around by your rota coordinators and get put call on your honeymoon or wedding (know many people this happened to)/have fixed annual leave in some jobs so u can’t choose when u go off and get screwed for kids holidays etc /can’t settle down until your a consultant in late 30s as your training can take you to any hospital in a deanery which can be hours away so every 6 months you move hospital one is 2 hours from the other - imagine the stress of moving every 6 months for years on end with kids etc/be revising for your exams when everyone else you know is getting pissed and broken up for uni (it is the longest degree and also the longest term times) / not attend your friends weddings for the tenth time as your on call/miss your kids bday because you couldn’t leave work.

the sacrifice every day made is quite frankly very hard to explain. Then it’s an insult to get paid nothing for it.

The doctors in this country will be looking after and saving the lives of our kids parents and friends. We need them to be happy and focus on their job and get what they deserve. Pay and better conditions. I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want the doctors in this country to be paid well and respected!

I'm with you every single step of the way.

I had my son in Urgent Care yesterday and we had bloody unbelievable care delivered unbelievably quickly.

I've every respect for our NHS, I owe it so much and I fear that before long, we won't have it.

I'm a NHS scientist, this was my pay as a mid point band 6 from about the same time (feb and march were OTT crazy with COVID). A ward sister will be on the same pay scale. I would honestly like to see what the public think we are worth. I've considered going back to uni multiple times but 4 years not earning and then F1+F2 make it unaffordable.

This is a very old payslip. Quite misleading

Given that you are intelligent enough to become a doctor I would have thought you were intelligent enough to have done your research into salaries as junior /senior doctors etc before embarking on your course of study. That's what everyone else has had to do. Having chosen a path (hopefully after researching) I don't think it's reasonable to now start whinging. You will be earning mega bucks very soon, if you aren't already,so no, you don't have any sympathy from me. You are very privileged, and deep in your heart you must know it, and add to that you've also got the privilege of holding innocent peoples lives to ransom to get more money, a privilege that other professions (apart from nurses and paramedics) don't have. I hope the government don't give in, and import more experienced and less greedy doctors.

Agree that being an accountant is ‘easier’ (and hence why I’m not a doctor!) I was just pointing out many people seem to think it’s paid vast quantities, but actually is paid about the same / a bit worse than medicine if you’re not in London.

The key point again being it is the working conditions which are the problem for medicine, accountants have it pretty cushy on the whole.

I support all junior doctors taking industrial action for pay restoration

NHS consultant now.

That FY1 payslip looks pretty much identical to my FY1 payslip over 10 years ago. The salary has been chipped away at slowly and steadily over time but the job hasn’t got any less hard. I agree the bottom line that if we were worth it in 2008, how come they aren’t worth it now? Pay restoration is what’s being asked for. But yes 35% isn’t going to happen in a oner. If I were them I’d be angling for restoration over a period.

Agree with PPs - medical school places are still competitive, people still want to do it. But the attrition rate in junior doctors is really high. We break them. And they really are leaving for Aus/NZ/Middle East. Or even if not actually emigrating they’re not going into specialist training jobs, they’re locuming so they can have a bit more control over their lives, as the requirements of the training jobs are too ridiculous - the hours, the geography, the inflexibility, the extra hours, the hoops. Say what you will about if it’s reasonable or not, they don’t think so so they’re not doing it.

When I qualified the majority went straight into further training after foundation. It’s dropped year on year since then and now it’s rare to do so.

Applications were down 10% this year on last for registrar jobs in all medical specialties., That’s after you’ve done foundation plus 2-3 years of general medical training and now specialising in something like cardiology, respiratory, renal, oncology, respiratory. They’re voting with their feet.

The answers are complex, I don’t think it’s really just about money at all. But things are very broke and we should be worried.

I'm with you every single step of the way.

I've every respect for our NHS, I owe it so much and I fear that before long, we won't have it.

Can you not see, @Milkand2sugarsplease, that strikes may be the thing that finally bring about the demise of the NHS that you revere so much?