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?

Writing that has made me angry! Thank you Tory voters

I don't. My postman son who is happy and has a lot of the preconditions for happiness - lots of physical movement, walking, being outside, sunshine, lifting heavy loads has chosen work that ensures happiness. I write just as much on line about eating paleo, what you need to do and eat to achieve the right balance of brain chemicals as much as I encourage women to achieve their potential.

I am just making the common sense point that over the next 10 years no one posting on here is going to lmake a fortune nursing so if you want more money do something else. if money does not matter then stick at it. You will be happy if you avoid a diet of sticky buns, if you keep your weight near 9 stone, get a lot of sleep, try to avoid shifts and do some exercise every day. That can matter a lot more than whether you buy that big house or have a lot of spare money in the bank. The problem with nursing is it tends to mean shifts which tends to lead to unhappiness, lack of sleep and problems with relationships and a propensity to obesity sadly. So I am afraid a good few nurses might earn the same but be happier and healthier if they were post men instead if they don't want to be business lawyers

I work as a band 6 community mental health nurse and as part if this role I spend 3 days working as a care coordinator for adults in a complex care and treatment team and 2 days as a DBT therapist working with patients with emotionally unstable personality disorder. We are under pressure as a team to save yet more money and many of our band 6 posts are being replaced with band 5's. If we get to the point of competitive interview I for one will most certainly be leaving the NHS

Your poor postman son lotus, i hope your obvious and undisguised disdain for his choice isn't as evident in real life.

What's a competitive interview?

Seriously people ask yourselves what is going to happen when enough nurses decide fuck this I can do good and earn a living wage or even better doing X, Y, Z.

You'll have a period of buying this care in from abroad, (which we already do) but once they get the experience they'll be off to better payed climes. (which already happens)

So there'll be a scrabble and less and less trained & experienced people will be put in positions of power.

Care will get worse and worse.

People who don't need to die, will

People will suffer, and sadly they will be the most vulnerable as always.

But you know what fuck them, cause I'll never be old, never develop a chronic condition,never have a child with such needs that some one needs to be home the whole time, never lose all my money, never have ungrateful children who will dump me soiled and confused at A&E so they can fuck off on holiday, but can't be arsed to buy in care.

I'll never be in a serious accident where I'll need someone with experience to say mmmmm, yeah they're talking and walking but look at those pupils, that slightly off gait and realise that actually you're slowly bleeding in to your brain.

I'll never be the little old women/man who develops beds sores that go to the bone ' cause my family who will be doing my personal care will know exactly what to look for, will know that most pressure sores are like icebergs.

I'll never be the confused, in pain person, who gets chucked in to a taxi at 03:30 because I can't afford to pay to stay the night after my operation.

It will be fine, really, I mean really, ' cause we'll all be making sooo much money we can ensure that we employ qualified DBS checked people to look after us.

Except well there aren't any, cause we're all off being Doctors or Lawers, or CEO's.

Ayeamorock- it's when say they decide they don't need 10 band 6's in the team anymore, they only need ( can afford) 5 so everyone on a band 6 gets put through a competitive interview for their own post and those not successful will be downgraded to a band 5 post.

Thank You to the lower- band nurse who held my hand through the night.
I'd had a mastectomy with LD flap reconstruction, done 24 hrs in HDU & gone back onto the ward early evening ish, I think, I wasn't really with it.
A haematoma developed on my back which got quite big & was extremely painful.
About 2am the in charge nurse came to reassure me that, as well as the skin graft on the front, they were monitoring my back every 10 mins, drawing on to see how much it was swelling & not to worry as she'd notified the emergency theatre & my consultant.
The general nurse, every time she got the chance, Sat with me, holding my hand, throughout that awful night. I was more frightened that night than I was the night before the mx.
So thank you, lower-grade nurse, whoever you are.
I wouldn't even recognise you if I walked past you in the street, but thank you for getting me through that awful night........there aren't the words to express my gratitude.

Surely there is a small gap between 'not enough money to raise a family' and 'making my fortune as a nurse-entrepreneur'?

Nursing isn't a disposable profession. We have an ageing population, top-heavy with a generation of people who are already beginning to be dependent on nursing care. 'Just leave nursing' is a solution for nurses, but not for society. Society needs nurses and that need is increasing quickly.

When the only nurses available are inexperienced recent graduates, because the abysmal pay progression and the staffing issues have chased the workforce away after a few years, maybe we'll start to rethink our priorities.

I'm not a nurse, but I volunteer with them. Nursing is seriously hard graft. A caring personality will get you through a shift of being spit on and hit in the face by dementia patients, but it won't pay the mortgage or the childcare bills.

What a lovely post Francis.

The pp suggesting that those of us who are sick and tired of being screwed over should simply "change careers" is entirely missing the point. We're not stupid, we know we have the option to change careers. The point is that Nurses shouldn't have to leave the profession in order to have a decent standard of living. This is what will happen though. I work with an excellent, very experienced nurse with post-grad qualifications who is leaving nursing altogether because pay freezes, increased pension contributions, rising registration fees etc mean that he is worse off than he has ever been despite having been promoted to band 6.

Unsocial hours makes up a huge amount of our wages. As a band 6 I earn more than a band 7 per month. There's little incentive to move up.

Not everyone can be a band 7 though even if they want to. As it should be, as you go up the bands there are less jobs to get. We need good, motivated, experienced qualified nurses and midwives on the floor, management shouldn't be the ultimate ambition, because once you hit band 7 you do a lot less actual nursing and midwifing and a lot more paperwork and managing.

But nurses in the lowest band earn the AVERAGE SALARY (and above) after a couple of years. That is without promotions to the higher bands, without shift allowances, without any overtime or bank shifts.

You can't say it's not enough to live a normal life when more than half the country manage on a lot less.

Yes but other similar professions like OT and physio still have clinical work as a band 7 and they progress much more quickly. There seem to be more senior allied health professionals than nurses. As nurses we get a lot more responsibility earlier on, I was in charge as a band 5. Yet I have physio friends who aren't even allowed a student until band 6. It's so varied, but not in our favour.

The fact is nursing and midwifery may pay the national average, but it isn't an average job in terms of hours, stress and responsibility. We need to pay above average in order to recruit and retain the right candidates to perform the required tasks to an acceptable level. At one time it was acknowledged that nursing etc was a profession that had an adverse effect on health, you would die earlier as a result of stress and working shifts and it was accepted that in order to compensate for that, adequate levels of pay would have to be implemented, alongside an earlier retirement age and a decent pension. This seems to have been forgotten in more recent times but it is all still true.

Aye, I didn't say it's not enough to lead "a normal life" whatever that means. I used the phrase "a decent standard of living", as in the standard of living that one would expect having spent three years training for a job that is extremely demanding and carries a high level of risk and responsibility. When you talk about it being an "average" salary you're looking at it from a simplistic point of view because not only does the job come with demands and a level of responsability that is not "average" but there are costs incurred by Nurses that you fail to consider. Increased pension contributions, rising professional registration fees, union fees and the cost of out of hours childcare makes quite a dent in your take home pay, especially when it's frozen for years on end. Not to mention that many nurses, like myself, have to pay £6 a day to park at our place of work. Many of the band 5 nurses I work with have second jobs or work extra hours on the bank to make ends meet which is not what I would call a "decent standard of living". I'm not saying we're all lining up at the food banks, I'm just saying I don't think we are fairly compensated for what we do.

And to be clear - before I get jumped on for advocating a race to the bottom, starting with nursing, that's not what I'm saying. I'm taking a wider view of the the economy and job market as a whole.

I just mean it's a good graduate salary, in a secure industry. Nursing students benefit from bursaries during their degrees and are pretty much guaranteed a job when they graduate, that can be done full time in 3/4 days. Other graduates are unemployed, on zero-hours contracts, or in minimum or low pay non-graduate roles, very few will go straight into graduate jobs. Everyone is facing higher pension contributions, and rising professional body fees, and childcare, that's not unique to nurses. That's just the current overall job market. Private sector are forcing more hours and less pay and crapper conditions on most areas of the workforce, many of which you also need a degree for, but are paid NMW.

The main issue, in my view, is that while it would be nice to have higher pay for all band 5 nurses, from what I hear it would be better to have more actual nurses on the shift to deal with the workload in hospitals, so it wasn't so out of control.

They absolutely should not abolish your shift allowance, though . Ridiculous idea.

If they did that then they'd have to increase the wage, but then those nurses in the less pressure, 9-5 roles would benefit and those working the hellish busy hospital wards overnight would lose out, which would be a disaster.

I wasn't entitled to a bursary when I did my nursing degree. Also it is an absolute myth that you are "guaranteed a job" when you graduate, several of my cohort struggled to find a permanent post in the NHS and ended up working in private care homes, for agencies or moving across the country for work. I really don't want to get into a public vs private sector pissing contest but there are a lot of sweeping generalisations being made about the private sector. It is not the case that "everyone" in the private sector is facing pay freezes, increased pension contributions etc, certainly not among my family/close friends anyway although I'm sure it's true for some individuals/professions.

Of course it would be better to have "more nurses on shift" but even if the money was there for this to happen it would depend on being able to recruit and retain experienced staff to the most high risk/demanding areas of nursing.

The Gov will probably offer a small increase across the board, to get rid of the anti social hours supplement, then those higher up will be happy and those relying on the weekend/nights to boost salary will prob be worse off. But they will divide and conquer. And then the Gov will come over as generous and 'saving' the NHS.

I really think nurses should strike to get rid of the vocational label.

Agree Nora, in fact, didn't they already do this with the police?

I think that's the most unfair potential outcome of this.

Well when the state cannot get the nurses it needs at current pay levels the pay will go up

No that doesn't happen.

They'll first seek from abroad.

Then they'll drop the level of skill nurses need to become nurses. Giving us an under-skilled workforce.

Pay won't increase.

So get out if money matters to you is the very simple message of the thread.

Yes because everyone should just roll over and let something they're extremely passionate about be destroyed.

Money matters to everyone no matter how much you love the job. The NHS isn't held together by goodwill and compassion alone. For too long have those attributes been taken advantage of, it's now coming to the point where nurses cannot afford to allow that to happen anymore.

Your comments aren't helpful, and is the sort of attitude that will lead to our healthcare system being decimated. People don't like to hear nurses complaining about pay and conditions, or trying to fight for better, but are always very vocal when they have a bad experience. Funny that.

Yay for Grays. Tell 'em how it is.