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

20% from employer.

So if you inc pension and gross salary is £25k they actually earn £30k with loads going into pension - this suddenly makes sense how the pension cap was affecting doctors. Guess they won’t be choosing between eating and heating in old age.

maybe that’s the solution. Match pension up to 5% (fairly standard) then 20% pay rise 5% pay and 15% reallocated from their pension.

Yes, doctors are not all that bright so they are bound not to notice

Haven't read the full thread - Just seen this article.

inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/saving-and-banking/manage-my-money-nhs-worker-earn-100k-year-2269155?fbclid=IwAR1yFa13t4Dx6jO2EhqgKkp26hWRDB0wvzFoFRCjjMvAcr2X6W3NoWFhRvk

This is not a million miles away from what it is actually like for teachers though. Tables flying through the air, ever increasing punitive paperwork, eating disorders, self harming in the toilets on their watch, endless demands from social workers, staff leaving all over the show and not being replaced - and young teachers are routinely skipping meals, suffering mental anguish, using food banks and taking second jobs.

To be fair here, your post could be an interpretation for most jobs nowadays in regard to staff not being replaced. So many workplaces are short staff with existing workers doing the work of 2 or 3 employees because either nobody is filling the position advertised or because the person who left wasn't ever replaced. I'm not saying the schools/NHS aren't working in rubbish conditions, but your post could most certainly be about any job now.

We’re also in Australia having left the NHS six years ago. DH is a senior consultant psychiatrist and we could see what was happening with the dismantling of services several years ago (mental health services are always the first to suffer when cuts are being made) and the service he was working in was becoming increasingly unsafe as people left and weren’t replaced. He said he wasn’t prepared to have his professional reputation put at risk by trying to hold together a service not fit for purpose especially as he’d be the one left taking the blame and losing his livelihood when lives were at risk or worse.
Sadly, you can’t strike because you think it’s unsafe, only for pay. These strikes should be raising awareness of how utterly awful it is working in the NHS at the moment, but also how dangerous it is to be a patient.
Too many of our friends have taken early retirement, or jobs outside the NHS or overseas. These senior drs are the ones who should be teaching the juniors coming through, but at this rate there won’t be any left to do the teaching!
Junior drs have always worked incredibly hard, long hours (I remember when DH was a junior doing 1:2 on call, so every other night and every other weekend), but what’s being expected of them now is unsustainable and unsafe.
Pay hasn’t kept up anywhere near enough. If we were to return to the UK now, god forbid, he would be earning £11k a year less than he was earning in 2003.
He was on an enhanced salary then because it was a ‘hard to fill’ post, but all the same, it’s madness that this is the case.
Come and join us, OP, it’s a pretty good life here and although you’ll still work very hard, you’ll have better support (and much better money).

I think what we're hearing on the thread is that they would like that cash now. The great pension seems not to register.

Well of course they will notice but if they want more money it has to come from somewhere, so give them more flexibility to use the additional 20% they are currently paid which goes directly into their pension as normal salary. 20% pension employer pension contribution is incredibly high.

The great pension is irrelevant when you’re 40 odd years away from it. God knows how many times you have to be told that before it registers.

To the OP, actually in teaching things are going the same way as in the NHS, you are covering multiple patients due to staff leaving, I find myself now on cover every free period due to teacher shortages, and I have had to run two classes at once (which was a nightmare)

But that is doable, its hard graft, but I'm paid to be there, however the knock on is that the admin, much of it pointless and unproductive goes over to the evenings and weekends.

I have recently had dealings with the admin side of the NHS, and it is an out of control inverse pyramid if ever there was one.

Striking is not the answer for me or you, what our respective unions should be saying is "look, this is your job, these are the things you are supposed to do, the rest of it we are collectively not doing"

A mate of mine who is a GP tells me a huge tranche of his time is taken up, like mine, with pointless admin - so he simply can't focus on his key role and gets worn out.

Rather than collectively standing outside with a plaquard saying we don't like it, we need to be inside, doing our core job collectively "work to rule" as it were and effect change from the ground up.

I just can't get behind something that will actually harm people and cause more misery.

@Pestispeeved and other PPs. It comes to something when some trainee city solicitors start on the salary of a top NHS consultant.

The other problem is that some hospital trusts can't afford to transition a qualified junior doctor to registrar, or registrar to consultant. Those junior doctors and registrars are then blocked from a higher salary. Their choice is either to try for a position elsewhere or stay where they are.

Oh it registers. This is why it's being suggested that the money is found by dipping into it. Are you hard of thinking?

No. I’m not rude to strangers either.

The pensions do seem to be the realistic way to go as in having less of a pension to have better pay now.

Hi there,
Thanks for your opinion. I cordially disagree. The NHS is being burnt inside out for the last decade.
Patients are at risk every single day.

We cannot just be quiet and pretend everything be normal. Everyone in the NHS is already doing everything they can on a sinking ship.

We cannot in good conscious not make a stand. We have to make a stand.

The 35% real terms paycut has been extremely damaging. We are human beings at the end of the day.

Not striking can be argued to cause more harm. We cannot stand for unsafe working conditions with patient at risk every single day for the last decade.

We are haemmorhaging doctors abroad making unsafe conditions for existing workers. Pay can entirely address that. If it weren't for the 35% real terms paycut, we would have had more doctors here who could safely staff the rotas. By not making a stand, more and more doctors are leaving. We have one of the lowest doctor: population ratios in all of Europe and we are short by 6000 doctors which is only going to increase. This puts the entire population at risk if there's not enough people to treat the general public and makes healthcare here extremely dangerous. Staff needs to not only be retained, but recruited as well. Right now it's a losing battle. There is a pipe leak which is not being patched up.

The government is the one with the power to change things and strike action is a formal stand to make the message clear.

Strike action is not about holding a plaqard outside saying we don't like it.

Strike action is about opening formal communication channels with the government which the BMA has been trying to do for the last couple of months to come and sit together at the table and see if there's a way of moving forward together with concerns being addressed. Steve Barclay is nowhere to be found however and is persistently lying about preconditions to the talks.

We are making a stand for our NHS and the future of our NHS.

maybe that’s the solution. Match pension up to 5% (fairly standard) then 20% pay rise 5% pay and 15% reallocated from their pension.

Tell me you know nothing about public sector pensions without telling me you know nothing about public sector pension...

There is a magic money tree. We know there is because we spent billions on covid including unused ppe bought from pals of ministers, contracts given out to other pals of ministers etc etc etc.

It turns out there can be plenty of money for things if we really want it to happen.

You wonder why the 'we're all in it together ' line from the 2008 financial crash isn't working any more? Because too much greed from those at the top. The money needed can come by stopping syphoning it off to mates via a million different scams. How much spent on HS2 now? Where's that money been spent so far?

Exactly

But that “magic money tree” can’t sustain things on an ongoing basis can it. Surely you can see the massive difference between the spending on covid (which will need to be paid for well beyond my life time) and ongoing costs of salary rises.

You clearly don't know anything about NHS pensions, they're nothing like public sector DB schemes. It's a pot of cash and is a completely ridiculous amount of money vs the private sector

it doesn’t really matter the mechanics. Somewhere there is a pot of money that includes an equivalent to 20% of this individuals salary. If that’s not how it works, why don’t you enlighten us as to what scheme the NHS is using to say it’s making 20% pension contributions without actually ever doing so and how this persons pension is then paid.

Stand your ground and don’t give in, personally everyone I know fully supports the strike action. You are correct in saying that the staff are the NHS

I helped the caretaker fill 2 skips with masks, aprons, visors, lateral flow tests at the end of term, 2 huge skips - that is where the magic money tree went, the loggers cut it down.

We currently spend about £5 billion a year giving money to construction firms for HS2
Maybe we could stop subsidising them?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-much-hs2-cost-money-spent-uk-2023-wvz9hdnz3#:~:text=The%20government%20does%20not%20publish,has%20gone%20to%20construction%20firms.