Is there sympathy for consultants striking?

[LadyTemperance]

Just as the thread title says, do you feel sympathy for the consultant doctors pay demands. I understand their pay has not gone up for many years meaning they have had a cut in real terms. That being said a quick google tells me they start on 88k and have regular pay rises not based on performance.
They are hardly on the bread line are they?

I don't have much sympathy with highly educated and highly paid individuals who choose to strike. If they don't like working in the NHS (which I can understand due to the working conditions) they have plenty of options to either emigrate, go private or retrain. If enough leave the government will have to revise their pay and rewards strategy and working conditions to increase the number of HCPs in the NHS. If doctors are choosing to stay in sufficient numbers things won't change.

Plus there's no money and soitshould be concentrated on the weakest in society.

There's multiple issues at play here - some of which we're allowed to strike over, others, we are not - such as the pension taxation situation, or general understaffing, or the 'future of the NHS'... We can only legally strike over contract terms and pay, I have no expectation that we will get offered anything like the ~30% rise for full pay restoration, but the hope will be that we may get offered something else like fixes to the pension taxation, inflationary pay-rises going forward, or some concessions on all of the other things that make working life miserable like reduced secretarial support, loss of offices, car parking, etc etc.

If you think that consultant's pay is commensurate with their skills / responsibility, then you also must think that our pay was 30% too high in 2008.

For context, I take home roughly £1000 / week for 56 hours of clinical work / admin and do maybe 10-12 hours of clinical leadership roles, professional development in my own time. From that I'll need to pay for professional fees, courses, society memberships, GMC etc which is around 10-15% of that £1000 depending on whether or not I go to any of the big annual society meetings and 1.2% of my salary just for car parking.

This week, I've operated on three legs, preventing them from being amputated, I've also operated on 4 ankle fractures and 1 severely injured polytrauma patient. In clinic I will see 60 patients this week, and I have 26 ward inpatients.

In surgical value alone - That's about £100 per patient for life saving / life changing / limb preserving surgery, per patient I've seen and treated it's around £10 per patient, which seems like pretty good value to me... I'm pretty sure the family of the lady who will walk out of hospital next week rather than leaving in a wheelchair thinks it is....

I disagree with the 'you knew what you were getting in to' argument, yes in 2000 I did - and doctors salaries were worth about 30% more in real terms than they are now - In 2006 I easily afforded my first house on one salary, then sadly had to sell it and move halfway across the country in 2009 to take up a training place with an 1500:1 competition ratio, right at the dip in prices - in negative equity and losing £30k in the process, I've lost child benefit, 22% of my predicted pension value with increased contribution rate on top, and the salary is 32% lower in real terms than it would have been - none of that was predictable.

The reality is that I live in a £190k 4 bedroom terrace in a cheap area in the north of the country (although it has a nice garden), have never taken my family on a holiday abroad, never bought a brand new car and have no savings - which is the reality for most doctors of my age (early 40s).

Quite honestly I do believe that we deserve better, the Government argument that doctors and nurses are too important to strike, and patients will be harmed, but simultaneously arguing that they're not worth a payrise is ridiculous - 'Schroedinger's healthcare professional'?.. anyone?

The reality is that doctors will leave - one of my colleagues has just moved to Dubai - he's on around £300k for his first year plus £45k per quarter bonus for meeting targets, and from next year his salary will double, then treble as he gets 1% then 2% commission on all of the work he does, he also gets chauffeured between hospitals. All I want is payrises that keep pace with inflation, free car parking and a bit of professional autonomy.

My pay has fallen 35% in real terms over the past 15years.

I do not work 35% less hard than my colleagues did in 2008. In actual fact I work harder - I dealt with a pandemic, flexing my skill set to support the acute care needed, my patient load is getting sicker & more complex and the system around me is crumbling.

as the consuktabt the buck stops with me. So when my employer fails to sort adequate IT support it’s often me grumbling around trying to fix the computer, when the admin person screws up the appointment letter and I notice it’s me who phones you the evening before to give you the correct information.

I am bitterly bitterly regretting not getting registration in an other country.

I do not want to work like this anymore.

my pension is worth substantially less than my predecessors, the bodies I need to pay to remain a doctor have not dropped their fees by 35% in real terms.

I do no private practice (an active choice as I firmly believe in the NHS).

i see younger colleagues really struggling with housing, student loan and professional exam costs. All of this reduces participation in medicine from those without family resources. My department has had trouble recruiting as younger doctors with kids cannot afford to live in the oncall catchment and quite rightly don’t want to accept a job where they are having to stay in a hotel away from their family to be on call.

quite frankly it would be nice to have the support of the British public but your support won’t pay the bills, help us recruit more colleagues.

junior doctors are leaving the UK at a terrible rate. This is having a huge impact. We need to retain the staff we have trained not staff Australia and plunder the developing world to staff the NHS.

The current situation is NOT what I signed up for when I was 18, nor what I sacrificed my twenties & thirties for working gruelling on call Rotas with loads of night shifts and weekends. The salary & pensio drops are immense. Consultants now do not have the lifestyle they had when I elected to go into medicine. Yet other graduate professions haven’t seen the same paydrops. I chose badly.

The medical profession have stayed silent for too long. Expertise costs money. If you want high quality healthcare the people that deliver it need paid appropriately.

Janina if they leave, they won’t come back. Striking is a way of crying out for help without completely abandoning ship. Your suggestion of emigration or retraining would be much more catastrophic (and is already happening in increasing numbers). Striking is a symptom of how bad the problem is.

I remember doing my elective in America as a medical student and encountering a theatre hand who was a qualified Dr. He’d moved from a communist country for a better life and was earning more as a theatre hand in the US than he had as a Dr in his home country. Surely we don’t want to lose our best and brightest Drs?

After a year of chemo and radiotherapy, my priority is my health and well-being and if I need to move to be allowed to work in a safe well paid environment then it’s something I’ll consider (if another country will take my cancery little body!). Also. I’m not good for my patients when I’m stretched so thinly it feels unsafe!

I do support them, yes. I know it seems like they're paid a lot to some.

Not really. They are paid a third less than they were fifteen years ago. When we compare salaries to international ones they earn half as much. What measure are you using?

“The medical profession have stayed silent for too long. Expertise costs money. If you want high quality healthcare the people that deliver it need paid appropriately”

Absolutely this. Astonishing how millions have no issue with the salaries of premier league footballers/so-called “celebrities”, etc. but believe that skilled people who may one day save their lives are grabby for wanting to be able to pay the mortgage on the home they probably don’t get to see often because of their working hours.

If the salaries were better, less would consider going into private practice. This would keep the nhs available for the poorest in society

I don’t think they’re that well paid for the amount of studying they do and experience they have so yes, I’m sympathetic and fully supportive.

no

Agree with this

Most of them work in the NHS. There are very few private only doctors.

Private practice is an interesting one.

Very, very few doctors go into purely private practice - some GPs are starting to, however most private surgical hospitals for example also insist that you have a local NHS practice as well - I think this is largely to avoid the private sector having to invest any of the money required for training and revalidations.

Most consultants who do private work also work more than full time for the NHS - the standard NHS contract is 10 sessions per week - in order to keep pay progression excellence awards and some pension benefits we have to offer 11 sessions per week to our trust before doing any private work.

Those who are consultants now did now have uni fees, bought houses when they were comparatively cheaper, and got paid salaries that were worth much more before being eroded by inflation. The reason to restore salaries is to retain "junior" doctors who don't have these things and are leaving in droves, otherwise there will be severe shortages of consultants in in near future

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY

It's about safe levels of staffing. Doctors and nurses are leaving the NHS in droves and it increases pressure on the ones left behind.

More money is the easiest way to stem the flow by preventing staff from leaving and attracting new workers from abroad or who have left.

Can you imagine working somewhere where your decisions are life and death but there's just too much work for you to be able to do it competently? It must be horrendous.

They can't exactly strike for more recruitment. More money is how they're communicating the need for the pressure on the NHS to be eased.

When I consider what top accountants and lawyers then yes I have some sympathy

but how many consultants earn a fortune in private practice? For them I have a lot less sympathy

But we are not talking about those - we are talking about NHS salaries. Many doctors in the UK don't go into private practice, many couldn't anyway (ICU, A&E doctors etc). Restoring salaries will help retain people who have trained years to get to be a consultant (5 years med school, 2 years Foundation, 6 years speciality training). They are not easily replaceable.

Very few consultants earn a fortune from private practice. you have to be in the South East in a fairly narrow range of specialties to do so.

Lots of specialties have very little PP opportunity E.g ED

lucrative private practice is a myth used by the right wing press. None of my large circle of friends do very much (anaesthetics) it simply isn’t worth it. Loads started but have given up as it wasn’t worth the effort.

This is the bottom line 👆

Do we want there to be Consultants in UK hospitals or not? Are we happy to continue losing them? Who or what would you like to replace them? There’s a ticking time bomb here about to explode. Loads of consultants coming up to retirement (and lots burned out/demoralised so going early), and the juniors coming up behind them emigrating.
So if you don’t have sympathy fine, but think on about how much worse things might get in the NHS…..

I support them. DH disagrees though!!

My feeling is it's part of expressing a wider frustration at lack of investment in the NHS over many, many years. The truth is they are very skilled, have invested years and years in training, work super hard and we really badly need them.

Also (and this is just an observation rather than an answer to the OPs question) the consultants I know aren't political as such i.e. they don't get caught up in ideologies, they are just very practical about cause and effect.

I mist admit I'm finding it hard to muster up any sympathy for them. £100K and, for many, the opportunity to earn loads more privately. Nah.

Their wages should still be keeping up with inflation etc same as everyone else's.

They have my sympathy and support.✊️

Plenty are leaving, that's the issue and yet the government still don't care.

To be honest it doesn't matter whether the public have sympathy or not, qualified and experienced consultants will be able to make a living outside of the NHS if they're not content, it'll be like dentistry where people invariably have to pay (and moan incessantly about it). It is in most of the publics interest to have a functioning free at point of use healthservice though, and if consultants feel the erosion of their pay and conditions is unacceptable then that's what matters. I left the NHS and know many many doing the same.

Consultant salaries don't reach 100k for many years. Many uk doctors don't work I'm private practice. And what about those that don't have the opportunity for private practice (A&E doctors, ICU etc). Why don't we restore their pay so they don't move abroad, quit or train in more "lucrative" specialities?