To ask band 5 nurses (at lower end of pay scale) how much you earn?

[Llbarls81]

I've just done a calculation as I'm due to qualify in September and I'm shocked at how little the pay is!! I've just worked out that a band 5 entry level nurse takes home around £1400 a month?? Surely this isn't right?

We don't have the staff needed to cover two 12 hour shifts per 24 hours. Where do you propose to find enough staff to cover three 8 hour shifts?

Nurses graduating from Ireland

who is going to staff the Irish hospitals?

I'm not a nurse I'm a midwife but same issues apply, we always have open vacancies. Always. And we employ half of Scotland.

Unfortunately your calculations are correct. I am a band 7 but do occasional bank shifts and only get paid the bottom of a band 5 for this (new bank rules). I pay my cleaner more than I get paid on the bank.

"Lotus bet your '3 graduate DC' aren't still working those hours because they're forced to. They do it because they see the glittering prizes of say, a hefty bonus? A partnership, maybe, ahead? But you'll be telling us they deserve this because they work hard."

Well one is a postman and he gets up at 5 every day.That's fairly hard work. Pay is about £20kso same as these new nurses, no promotion costs. The heavy lifting is quite heavy and there is a lot of walking. I don't think it's a sensible job choice but I don't control my children nor produce clones. His glittering prize is the here and now - that he is outside in the fresh air and finishes work every day around 3pm and it keeps you fit and happy.

The girls - lawyers - there is no guarantee you will get a partnership or a bonus (in fact in law bonuses are quite rare) and most people fail or can't get in in the first place. it is not quite as easy as nursing in terms of A level grades needed same as becoming a surgeon.

We could certainly as a society pay no wages and the state instead provide a house and food to everyone as a good few communist states have done and what you get is the same whether you are the leading surgeon or the cleaner. However the communist party never does too well in the UK.

Certainly at the moment we have been protecting NHS spending during the recession which may in fact be unwise but we certainly need to try to reduce this massive gap between what we spend as a nation and what we earn.

I do recommend anyone with teenagers take them on line and show them lifestyle and pay so they make informed choices - that nurse could have read medicine at Cambridge. Nothing special about my sibling who did that - jsut hours of hard work - and obviously the pay is better than becoming a nurse. Or at least an informed choice - my postman son knows that means low pay - his choice. He's not interested in money.

It's pretty good to be able to get all your work for the week done in either 3 or 4 days doing 12 hour shifts, and then having 3 or 4 days off to rest, see family or work extra shifts if you want to earn more money. Not many jobs have that option.

I think if the NHS was privatised you'd probably find that overtime was expected to be done for free. That's generally how salaried jobs in the private sector work; you're paid for 7-8 hours, but you do 10-12. It's just the way.

He's unlikely to kill anyone on his postal round though by posting a letter through the wrong door. There are loads of really hard, manual, physical jobs out there that are low paid and it is a crying shame, but nursing and midwifery are unique (alongside medicine obviously), you don't do your job right, people die. That's a hell of a responsibility. And yes, you know the responsibility in theory when you decide to do the job but believe me you can't know it until you know it, when you're doing the job. I think the wages we get at the minute are 'ok' but that's because we get compensated adequately for the weekends and nights and special holidays etc, not to mention the fact that shift work has a detrimental effect on your physical and mental health and we will all die sooner than the lawyers and the accountants.

The NHS runs on unpaid overtime. Don't kid yourself any different.

I read this week that this country will be short of 190,000 nurses by..............next year. That's a scary stat.

Part of my job is to support nurses. I'm often hard put to it to know what to do or say. So in answer to the OPs question - I don't think Band 5 nurses are paid enough but if we had enough of them then yes it might be. It's the degree of responsibility they have to take for the sheer number of sick people that's really pushing the profession at the moment and no end in sight.

I don't think nursing and midwifery are unique. I think they are in a similar position to paramedics, police, firemen. and the pay is comparable.

For all those saying about how every shift is a high-stress, life and death decisions constantly, no time to pee etc, then there are the nurses who aren't in a busy ward where the nurse is doing a 12 hour overnight shift (my friend is a nurse) and told that they can just sit and do their coursework overnight, and that each nurse can pick a 4 hour slot to have a sleep.

So obviously the NHS isn't allocating the funding effectively or efficiently, which needs to be looked into so that the "spare" nurses are being used where they need to be. As why should you be paid wage +40% to sleep?

If we continue our comparison of postmen and nurses which I'm quite enjoying....it sounds like the postmen are paid less. Delivering post - yes you're unlikely to kill someone although he's had 2 driving accidents by the way in post office vans and a colleague had the end of his finger chopped off by a dog and the responsibility to get letters to people including cheques still even these days is quite a big one.

Presumably a nurse unhappy about pay could consider setting up a nursing agency and employing staff or buying a care home or chain of them - ots of routes for some to better paid work. Perhaps use the nursing as a stepping stone as an entrepreneur.

Remember Ann Souter - ex nurse
"Educated at Caledonian Road Primary School and Perth High School, she qualified as a nurse and during a 20 year career worked as a burns unit sister. She is ranked as Scotland's richest woman

Using her father's redundancy money, and working with her brother Sir Brian Souter and her husband Robin Gloag, Gloag established the Stagecoach Group in 1980, running buses from Dundee to London. Expansion continued and in the early 1990s, Stagecoach acquired National Bus Company operations in Cumberland, Hampshire, East Midlands, Ribble, Southdown and the United Counties. Stagecoach bought further bus operations in Scotland, Newcastle and London, with Manchester being added a few years later."

Aye I can honestly say I have never experienced that in years of nursing , anyone sleeping for 4 hours of their shift would be disciplined.

2/3 of midwives will retire in the next 20 years . I recently met a midwife who was unable to leave after her shift as there was no one to take over the care of the women labouring. This is common and they work many extra hours that they will not be paid for.
I never understand the argument that many professions work long hours and overtime, so nurses should - are you bonkers ?? You want someone who is already 13 hours into a shift and exhausted, to stay and look after you when you are seriously ill !?

Not enough nurses /MW are being trained in the UK and those who do often leave ( avg 5 years) or go abroad.
We have an unprecedented crisis looming .
Telling nurses to go and be an entrepreneur- and earn more money.
Well that will help ,wont it !

A four hour break fuck me that's a new one. Now nurses are paid too much, their job is only as stressful as a postman and get four hour sleeps.
When I worked in a busy paediatric assessment unit you took your one hour unpaid break you got behind in all your tasks. So you didn't take it. Aye it was a life of Riley on the ward.

Oh ayeamarok you have given me the best laughs on this thread. I think we call it delusional in psychiatry

Ayeamarok does your 'nurse friend' know how little you think of her and her profession?

And to the person comparing the responsibility of a postman to a nurse just makes me want to give up. I hope you never need the nhs

Yes a postman would find the working day of a nurse a doddle I bet ya. Bitten by dogs- try being bitten/spat at/punched/kicked by angry parents who's children are in hospital as a place of safety due to child protection concerns!

Aye - that is not something that happens in an acute hospital setting. Night time does odd things to the elderly and unwell. Nurses who tried to sleep through it would find 1/2 their ward on the floor or away down the road by 6 am and the other 1/2 would be writing their e-mails to PALS about unanswered call bells.
Please don't spread misinformation about nurses. It's bollocks and you know that.

I hope that finger that was bitten off by the dog didn't need nhs attention. I had a partner who was a postman he would be the first to say how unskilled sorting mail is. In fact it attracts those who do not wish to engage the brain. He also had things like a 20% increase in wages over 3years

Aye I've never heard of this in the nhs and agree this would ve considered gross misconduct however agree that some.people on this thread are being slightly melodramatic. not every shift is life and death in fact unless you work on hdu or a&e type places then most shifts are just the usual slog. Yes when I work nights it's pretty chilled once all the patients are asleep but then I spend the rest of the night catching up on all the paperwork I can't do during the day And since I'm usually the only nurse then there's no chance of leaving the ward for a break so I'm stuck eating at the nurses station.

Haha Aye where is this hospital? Four hour sleep breaks...I wish. No longer do nights as I work in a gp ptactice but the nights I remember were long and hard and certainly not punctuated with a 4 hr break. Worst experience watching the snow fall all night and having no one to handover to to the next morning as the nurse due to take over was stuck on a country road impassable with snow. I can tell you it was adrenalin only that kept me going that morning as I started the morning drug round. It is one of the few jobs where you can not simply walk away if no one comes to replace you.

Frik we would frequently get very sick children admitted at all hours of the day who can deteriorate very quickly. And although we were an assesment unit the bed managers would pile pressure on us to take the most inappropriate admissions as the hospital are fined if they cannot admit through a&e the children who need admitting. We had THREE HDU children on our ward one night with the same ratio of nursing staff who could not offer their patients the best care but we just had to middle through. It was a PIN number loss waiting to happen.
So don't minimise what I've wrote on this thread as melodramatic, please.

I never understand the argument that many professions work long hours and overtime, so nurses should - are you bonkers ?? You want someone who is already 13 hours into a shift and exhausted, to stay and look after you when you are seriously ill?!

To be clear, I absolutely DON'T think that a nurse who has already done 12 hours should stay on longer, definitely not. I think shifts should be 8 or 10 hours long, max.

However, nurses I know prefer the 12 hour shifts because they can work their hours in 3 days. The downside of that is if management is poor and shifts aren't adequately covered then it leaves people getting into dangerously long shifts where they are likely to make a mistake. I don't think that should be allowed. I think the shifts should be 8-10 hours, and 4 or 5 days.

Just because you haven't experienced it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I know a few nurses. The one I mentioned (who could sleep on night shifts) has also worked in busy wards so has seen both extremes, but most places she's worked have been somewhere in the middle. Another is in ICU in a trauma centre where nights are sometimes quiet, sometimes sheer hell. Nurse 2 frequently says on her way out after her shift she she's A&E nurses in tears because they are so exhausted and short staffed.

I've also had relatives on wards where overnight (and during the day, but it's especially annoying at night) the nurses are sitting chatting at their station and leaving drip machines to beep loudly for 45 minutes at 3am, torturing all the ill people in that ward who need rest to recover. And this happened every. single. night. They weren't busy, well, busy chatting.

Not all nursing jobs are the same. The NHS is very poorly managed.

She sees she's

I was referring to Lotus and her DC who work all hours Aye

I have worked in Acute Medicine for many years frik the potential for patients to become very sick fast is always there and its the nurses responsibility to recognise it early.

Someone who is working on an acute hospital ward and has patients who simply go to sleep and not need constant monitoring ivs/ivf/obs/urine outputs/ analgesia is not working in an acute setting.