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?

So only people on the breadline can claim to be poorly treated?

How many times do I have to say I AM NOT A MEDIC?!! Comprehension really is not your strong point, is it.

Compare how much harder and longer it is to become a consultant than a nurse. It's not even comparable. Do you resent consultants getting paid more than shelf stackers too?

You are being utterly unreasonable to choose now to make a point, the timing is crucial and you have got this completely wrong, when so many people face losing their homes, livelihoods and can’t afford to eat. You are now demanding a stratospheric pay rise.

I supported the nurses but can not support this strike. No way.

They've been asking the Government for pay restoration for a decade @GCalltheway you've just not been listening.

What is the pay rise demand?

I'd like to know how @GCalltheway proposes to stop the mass exodus of medical staff without pay rises. Genuinely, tell me how you'd fix it.

This. It requires an exceptional talent and level of persistence and hard work to achieve consultant grade. If we value the NHS we need to retain these people.

It is tone deaf.

Consultants and junior doctors are already an incredibly privileged group in society - what clever working class kid can even possibly hope to consider 6 years in Med school?
No doubt you will reel off one but in the main these are privately educated, wealthy children that can take the financial hit and in time they will reap huge dividends for their efforts.

The working class kid might be equally intelligent - work just ss hard but will never ever hope to earn anything like the kinds of salaries you take for granted.

You have been drinking too much cool aid.

What you are doing is deeply unethical.

If I look at our group of friends (all had the grades for medicine) everyone but the NHS staff has had a pay rise that = or beats inflation.

This is in fact landing very badly with the public, even in light of their usual adoration for the ‘heroes’ of the NHS. How you have managed to go from being hero to zero is a masterclass in PR dynamics that will be studied for years.

The cause: greed. Pure greed.

The majority of my year at medical school were state educated. We’re not all over privileged stereotypes and none of my friends drive a Merc! Love my wee Kia. This thread is just so depressing. As a patient first, Dr second (still off recovering from cancer), this thread is beyond depressing.

Where do your friends work?

National statistics say different in terms of pay increase vs inflation.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272447/uk-wage-growth-vs-inflation/#:~:text=Average%20weekly%20earning%20growth%20in%20the%20UK%20compared%20with%20inflation%202001%2D2023&text=In%20the%20three%20months%20to,the%20same%20period%20in%202022.

Clever working class DC can and do study Medicine. There are extensive widening participation programmes to help with this. A medicine degree is five years, only six if Oxbridge or St Andrews or you intercalate. You are letting your silly class politics cloud common sense. If you don't pay medics what they are worth (junior doctors and consultants), they will leave and people will die. Full stop.

‘People will die’. unless you pay us eye watering sums of money.

There it is folks.

@GCalltheway just what they are worth, not eye watering to everyone. Depends on your perspective. In any case that's all irrelevant, the market decides. Live with it.

@GCalltheway but that's part of the reason why we are doing this.

Many of my generation new - 10years in consultants were state educated and from less privileged backgrounds.

But the current set up with vast fees, capped support loans and then the very poor salaries post qualifications means that this will no longer be possible.

My newly appointed colleagues are really struggling with housing and debt costs. One of the drivers for me in asking for pay restoration is to try to maintain this equity of access to medicine. In the current climate I wouldn't suggest it.

If you do medicine you have to work for 12 years of fucking awful rotas doing difficult post graduate exams before you earn the same as someone who has done a Physicians Associate (PA) qualification. The training time is pretty much the same. The former get financial support with books and learning materials. The latter don't.

The former work much more regular hours.

The former have far less responsibility.

I know what I would do!

The issue is PAs can't actually entirely staff the NHS you need some mugs of doctors too and in the current climate all the UK trained ones will be in Australia.

They have my full support, as do the nurses, junior doctors, and all other NHS workers who are lower on the pay scale.

Your OP acknowledges they've had their pay stransgled for a number of years. They stepped up during the pandemic. Apparently that means nothing to you. That is a political choice you have made.

Their pay is predicted to be nearly 15% lower in real terms than it was 10 years ago. In only one year in the last 10 years have they had a real terms pay rise. See here. https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/chart-of-the-week-what-has-happened-to-nhs-staff-pay-since-2010

To say that they are too well paid suggests to me you simply haven't a clue about any of this. Consultants are leaving the NHS and working abroad for far more money (for less work). They are prepared to work in the NHS for less, but at present they are being treated (along with the rest of the NHS) with such a lack of respect, by both the government and by people like you, OP, that they understandably are starting not to care what kind of mess we will be in if the experts choose to leave the UK and let us wallow in the cess pit people like you seem to want us to live in.

Frankly I am incredibly angry about it all.

Your year was an anomaly. Its been the case forever that medical students disproportionately come from affluent homes and were privately educated.

Well someone has to pick up the bill pal! And strangely enough I would rather we supported those genuinely struggling, like nurses.

Didnt they teach you at Med school that we don’t have money trees?

I look forward to you training to be a doctor. Perhaps then you can accept whatever the government fancies paying you.

just listening to someone in ROI talk about their system and extolling the virtue of charging for GP appointments

Says it cuts down on superfluous visits. Maybe we should emulate. Plus they have very attractive corporate tax rates.

It all sounds like it’s working for them

FGS again, I am not a doctor and I support nurses too. It doesn't have to be either/or. However, if there are no doctors, nurses are not going to be doing your quadruple bypass are they? Or are you going to refuse that as well because you don't like the surgeon? You are getting way too much airspace on this thread with your idiotic, ill-informed and ignorant views.

No one is saying that we need to keep things exactly as they are.
Clearly the long shifts are an issue, the incentives to study medicine need to be improved, med places need to be expanded and better support given but the demand for up to a 30% pay rise is utterly ludicrous and bound to fail - has to fail - because we can’t afford it.