Are consultants right to strike for more money?

[mids2019]

To a few of my friends an average salary of 128K would seem reasonable renumeration. Although the job is highly skilled with a large degree of responsibility surely you can survive on 128K per.year?

@Freepo Sorry but I do think it shows a massive lack of integrity. The timing is completely wrong, there is a massive COL crisis and we are being asked to inflate the salaries of some of society's highest paid by 35%. Striking will impact on the poorest patients - the rest of us went private years ago to avoid the shitshow that the NHS has become.

I suspect the BMA just wants to try to bring the government down. I not averse to this (far from it...) but it's not really part of their remit. We are not a high-waged country and consultants are already doing better than the vast, vast majority of people.

Anecdotal but I was at a dinner with a consultant the other day who claimed that £120k was "middle manager pay". It really isn't, unless we're talking hedge fund management. By the same token, any fule kno that junior doctors are paid more than people in Pret, but they keep peddling their half-truths as though the rest of the country has been lobotomised.

So you have private healthcare, a husband who primarily works in private healthcare for way in excess of what the people you’re criticising earn, and claim to be concerned about the poor NHS patients. If you actually cared about that, you’d be lobbying your husband to get back into the NHS to help said patients. Instead, your husband has (apparently with your blessing) decided he isn’t willing to work in the NHS for NHS pay without a £200k private salary injection and you’re telling people that are willing to do so they should be happy with what they’ve got, namely significantly less than you.

my husband does infinitely more to help the poor NHS patients you claim to care about than your husband, not least working his arse off doing extra hours to ensure patient safety in the junior doctors strike, and taking additional night shifts in the covid ICU at weekends despite working Monday to Friday in his usual job. one day on strike doesn’t make the private consultants who aren’t stuck with the shit their NHS colleagues are the good guys here.

I’m stunned if you really can’t see the efforts being made by NHS consultants, way above and beyond the call of duty, to do their best for those requiring NHS care such that you call one strike sufficient to undo all of that hard work and show a lack of integrity. You demonstrably have no idea at all about life in the NHS because you get such a skewed perspective from your husband’s circumstances.

shall I tell you, assuming you actually care, what will fuck over the “poorest NHS patients”? When there are hardly anything consultants left in the NHS to treat them because they got consistently treated like shit with people like you cheering from the sidelines.

@Freepo I'm not here for a bunfight. I am acknowledging my privilege by saying I don't think we need additional money at the expense of the taxpayer, but yes I extend that to all consultants including those at the very beginning of their careers on £82k.

The NHS consistently fucks over the poorest patients - that's the main reason why no other countries have one. Your DH would be better spending his time campaigning for a functioning healthcare system that is not run along communist lines - it's also far more likely to get him the payrise.

Crack on with the insults if you like, but I won't be responding.

You are kidding😳 If I'm having that type of surgery I want an expert with experience and you're not going to get any of them for £50k!

It’s very transparent to try to dismiss my post as “insults” - report it if there are “insults” in it. You can’t accuse other people of lacking integrity then get precious about insults.

strikes are more than just about people bare “need”, but I am not sure you’re interested in that. It seems that because your family have fled the sinking ship, you simply don’t care about those left behind trying to keep it afloat.

The truth is that most Consultants are at the top of their field and many come from a private education background. Many of them even made a choice to go into medicine over Investment Banking and now see their friends who chose opposite earning double or triple what they do.

The truth is as a Quant I earn 150K basic. Yes my job ensures the integrity of the financial system but a big part of the reason why I earn more is because globally there aren’t very many people who have the qualifications and experience that I do.

That’s not the case in Medicine — The NHS uses India as a marketplace for cheap doctors who aren’t burdened by high student debt. For them £45-50k is a huge amount of money and the long hours are worth it for permanent residency in the UK. So until the NHS stops betraying UK educated junior doctors by giving essential stepping stone jobs to foreign educated doctors (many of whom don’t have a comparable education) raising consultant salaries would be a joke. An Indian or African educated doctor shouldn’t be paid as much as a UK educated one. The US and Australia understand this and so should we.

You can often find a consultant with 10 years experience for that salary. Just they’ll be foreign educated.

Working for the NHS? Are the home grown ones better, do they get paid better?

I don’t know. But husband comes from a family of doctors. A cardiologist with 10 years postgrad experience and a neurosurgeon with 13 years postgrad experience have both recently accepted NHS roles on £50k. Both of them are married to doctors (both are Oncologists) and they also have NHS jobs lined up in the same trusts as their husbands but one is slightly higher paid than the other two while the other is 30kish for reduced hours. None of these doctors came from even a good uni in India - The one earning 30k is probably the most experienced.

Are these tragic salaries? Yes of course they are. UK educated doctors don’t earn this after 10-15 years of experience.

Tragic, you're not wrong! Appalling.

You are probably referring to staff grade jobs, not consultant posts. Yes the range starts at about 50k - for full time work, even with years of experience. Range goes up to about £80k. Trusts often get them from abroad.

consultant pay ( following all the required training ) starts at 88k for 40 hours.

This is not comparable to other countries and is the reason for the recruitment and retention crisis currently seen in the NHS.

It’s fine and all for those not using the NHS to not give a F* but for the majority of the public in the uk, they would actually like to have a staffed NHS.

Hence the right thing to do is strike.

Cannot believe the lack of integrity in the few consultants who do a half arsed job in their nhs roles, mostly work privately, and don’t care about the Recruitment / Retention crisis as they and their families wouldn’t lower themselves to use the NHS themselves.

Doctors are not the only people who have to study for a long time, who save lives and contribute to healthier lives, who have to pay horrendous professional registration fees and who have student debts.

This is such an invalid argument to use when saying doctors should be paid more due to these points.

Health of the population is not just linked to health care. Though I fully support the strikes the arguments for it shouldn’t dismiss others professions.

Sorry if I’m being ignorant here but aren’t the pensions pretty good? My understanding was always that public service didn’t promise amazing pay but the pensions accumulated are the reward?

I cannot get my head around the mental gymnastics @Vinvertebrate is performing to open a thread saying her DH is against the strike because his current salary ‘is enough’ but then casually drop in that he supplements it with a 200% top up from private work

And then openly gloats that the private work is coming from a less well run hospital, which is presumably paying well over the odds to get private providers to cut their waiting lists

While at the same time saying that a pay rise to eliminate the very issue of a doctor shortage creating private demand would be somehow exploitative to low earners, in a way that hospitals paying a huge premium for private work isn’t..?

And yes , £120k is middle management pay in most of the private sector. It’s a starting salary at a hedge fund or decent law firm. Partners can add a zero on the end.

Hell, even the senior PAs at my place are now nudging £100k and I bet they get less out of hours hassle than most doctors

I believe Binvertebrate is enjoying the benefits of the less well run hospital passing on an extraordinary amount of private work to her husband. It makes him perhaps the best paid consultant in the land.

it wouldn’t suit either of them to staff the local hospital by addressing the recruitment and retention staff gaps, now would it

Integity, eh?! Who needs that?! Not Mr or Mrs Binvertebate, that’s for sure

This is such a brilliant post. I keep trying to say similar on these threads but never quite get it right. But this is spot on. It matters not what you think public sectors should be paid. If you want them to be there, you have to pay them what they feel they are worth or accept the consequences.

Who else are you thinking of? What makes you think people are not supportive of them recieving fairer pay too?

Engineers, Geologists, Hydrologists, there’s plenty more people in professions that protect and improve lives.

I haven’t said people are against them getting better pay, I said the argument that doctors are the only people who have long degrees etc is a poor argument. Please re read my post.

I know several people in differnt fields of engineering and geology. Whilst I absolutely agree they carry out very important roles and are necessary for the functioning of society you simply can not argue they have many as many years of study as a consultant has undergone.The engineeers I know mostly did 3 year undergraduate degrees (although one did a 4 year masters degree) then went into work. Thats hardly comaparable to a 5 or 6 year undergreduate medical degree, 2 further years of pre-registration training, followed by a further 3 years at least of studying for postgraduate exams, followed by a further 3 years of higher specialsit trianing which is what a doctor will have undertaken by the time they become a consultant.
I dont know what professional fees engineers need to pay annualy but would be surprised if it as much as a consultant (although Im prepared to be coreected if im wrong) average consultant can expect to pay - £430 GMC fees , £1250 medical insurance, £450 Royal College fees and around £400 BMA membership per year.

100% support them! As a PP said, they've been through many years of education and training, working extremely unsociable, long hours, where lives hang in the balance. It shouldn't be a matter of 'oh they should be able to survive on that'. They should be thriving and people shouldn't begrudge them a much higher than average salary.

Doctors do have long degrees then many many years of further training once qualified doctors to reach consultant level, none of those are really comparable education wise to a consultant.

The long degree was a decision the UK / USA made. Not all countries require an MBBS to practice medicine. In fact if medicine was more training and less academia the NHS might attract the right people to the profession in the first instance rather than rich kids who wanted to work shorter hours than in banking.

the vast majority of the medical degree, certainly after the first year, is actualy based around clinical placements, you do realise that dont you? And then after the 5 year degree doctors are still in training for another 7+ years, so not sure you can argue there should be more trianing.
And I dont know about you, but if I am about to operated on by someone I would be quite reassured they had done some studying and spent their first year at medial school learning anatomy so they had a bit of an idea on where to cut me open and what to remove for example!

Actually there are plenty of countries including most (all?) in the EU who stipulate a minimum number of hours for a medical degree in order to be able to practice there. One reason the government is proposing to cut medicine degrees so that people who train here can't move abroad easily. Not sure why you're so intent anyway on downplaying their training- very odd.