AIBU unreasonable to say everyone should know about the junior doctor's contract the government is trying to impose?

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The government is seeking to impose a new contract on junior doctors. By junior doctors I mean all those in training I.e. Not consultants and GPs. Starting salary for these doctors is £22636 plus a supplement for additional & antisocial hours worked.
The contract seeks to re-classify normal working hours so that 9am on a Tuesday will be the same as 9pm on a Saturday night (so normal hours Include up to 10pm 6 days a week). This will lead to a pay cut of 10-30% for all junior doctors depending on which specialty they work in. They also propose to remove certain safeguards over lack of breaks & working over contracted hours.
They also propose to entirely scrap a pay supplement for junior doctors training to be GPs. This was designed to make pay equivalent to that of a doctor in hospital training who receives the pay banding I mentioned above. There is already a recruitment crisis in general practice. One in ten posts in England are unfilled in a recent survey. Many training posts are unfilled too.
You might think this doesn't matter to you but we are all patients sometimes. I know people who won't be able to afford their mortgage if the contract is imposed and they plan to emigrate. What will happen to the NHS then?

All of my best friends are doctors. There are clearly issues particularly in the larger hospitals. I'm really not saying there isn't a problem to fix, but salary is the least of the issues given how it changes.

The point is that most workers would not accept an employer unilaterally imposing a worse contract. This would not happen in the private sector because people would walk. At the same time the govt is cutting the NHS to the bone and making it a shit place to work. Who wants to work in a service that fails it's clients and doesn't respect it's staff. People will vote with their feet and seeing a doctor will be even harder than it already is.

We all should care. We all love or know someone who has or will be in hospital, under the care of a junior doctor, making life or death decisions. When they're doing that, I want them to be sharp and thinking clearly, not so fucking exhausted and demoralised that they make an error!

Unilateral changes to contracts happen all the time (I'm an employment lawyer) although there can of course be fall out in terms of tribunal claims depending on whether or not the unions collectively agree to the changes on behalf of their members.

Actually all this frothing is completely made up - if you go to the source you will see that NOTHING has been decided yet.

The trouble is, in the global economy, if you underpay staff with internationally valued skills, they will emigrate. Also if you underpay juniors, you lose the goodwill that drives the NHS.

I am struggling to think of another public sector job or profession where 7am-10pm 6 days a week are standard hours (that's a 90 hour week) and you have someone's life in your hands if you make a mistake (would you be happy flying in a plane where the pilot had already worked 13 hour days all week and this was their 6th day of such? - pilots aren't allowed to fly more than 30 hours a week because they could kill lots of people if they make a mistake through overtiredness.)

In fairness - and I am completely against this - but firstly, tiredness is par for the course for junior doctors and secondly and perhaps most saliently, paying them more wont change that!

If you've done a twelve hour shift you are tired no matter what it's paid!

It really shouldn't be a race to the bottom. Contracts and conditions aren't good for some public service workers so we'll make them crap for everybody?

Atticus the problem is that the govt relies on a huge amount of goodwill to keep the NHS functioning. It's not easy to work hours of unpaid overtime, or dig up reserves of compassion and kindness, if you have had a brutal new contract imposed on you. After a while any human will become so exhausted and demoralised, they can't do the caring aspect of the job.

Thank you for sharing this OP.

As a long-term patient, I find this so depressing. £22k for a job that involves taking such responsibility. Maybe they'll decide it's not worth it and go into banking.

780539gjg my work place relies on lots of good will too - I don't get paid any more no matter how many hours I work - or anyone else I work with. im told im senior so get on with it - don't like it theres the door.

wonkylegs its not a race to the bottom - its already a reality for millions of workers.

Vivienne, but if you cut their pay then not only will the already tired doctors being working for less, recruitment will reduce and some doctors will leave - existing doctors will then have even more strain placed on them for service provision. It's not even safe practice, let alone fair.

And the 'well a consultant earns loadsa money' argument is flawed. So what if you might be able to earn a decent salary in 15 years time (or however long)? That doesn't help you support a family, pay a rent/mortgage etc now. If you just cannot afford a 30% pay cut now then you will have to leave the profession or move somewhere else. And bear in mind doctors also have lots of expensive exams to pay for so their pay packet doesn't all go in their pocket.

So yes, lots of people have jobs with long shift hours for rubbish money, but how many of them have such responsibility for making decisions about people's lives? They don't. The general public is very good at championing firefighters, nurses, paramedics etc, but doctors seem to be but in a different catergory of 'elite, overpaid, posh people' which is nothing but a con by the media (in my opinion). Nobody goes into medicine for the money or the lifestyle!

And while I'm on rant, where are those extra 8000 new GPs going to come from to allow already-stretched GP surgeries to extend to a 7 day service? There are only approx 6000 graduates coming through medical school each year...

No I'm not a doctor btw

Sorry, the tiredness comment was not to vivienne at all, but Blackcloudsbrightsky, not sure what happened there!

It's the first step on the road to privatisation and that's horrifying.

Lunchpack 7-day rota, shift workers get time off (equivalent to having weekends off time-wise) and most get paid a supplement for unsocial hours e.g. nights. Junior doctors work weekends in addition to their regular working week, meaning they can work 2-3 weeks with no days off, at all.

But presumably Peggy, if you had years of pay cuts and poor working conditions, you would reach a point where it wasn't possible for you to give the goodwill any longer. You would end up working to rule or leaving. In the end it's not about what is fair, it's about what happens to a workforce and a service if you consistently underinvest in it. I'm an HCA and I find that if my employers and patients don't care about my wellbeing, it's almost impossible for me to care for patients. We're not compassion robots.

Isn't the '90 hour week' a bit misleading? As I understand it they are saying that there will be no unsocial hour payments for between 7am-10pm? Not that junior doctors will have to work those hours.

The rest of the NHS get no unsocial hour payments between 6am-8pm weekdays, it's not much different. No unsocial payments for weekends is a bit mean though, and very shortsighted.

It can be hard to see the issues if you are not in the profession, but frankly it doesn't matter if you 'don't see what the problem is', doctors DO see what the problem is so are emigrating. In droves. There are already lots of GP vacancies and it is just going to get worse.

I think the OP is quite disingenuous.

No junior doctor actually takes home 22k a year (because of the top ups for unsociable hours).

The 22k is a baseline salary for ONE YEAR. People are implying this is what a doctor who isn't a consultant will always be on. Which is absolutely not the case. A non-consultant doctor can earn a baseline salary of 70k plus the top ups. After one year that 22k +about 30% in top ups becomes 28k plus the top ups. And continues up to 47k+ while in training.

It also implies that a junior doctor's 22k salary is being cut by 30%, as if junior doctors are going to be working 90hours a week for 15k. Which isn't true either. They aren't working those hours, it's that any hours worked within 7am-10pm, Mon-Sat will be paid at the normal rate and not attract an additional allowance. Which is not unreasonable.

Having said that, I don't think doctors should be working any more than 60 hours in a week so if they are being asked to work longer hours then I think that is a bad thing.

Peddling myths doesn't help their cause. Just state the situation as it is and let people decide their views, that way you get more genuine support.

The whole way the NHS is structured, staffed and operated is totally unsustainable. It does bad things to patient, staff and tax payers. We need to stop tinkering to shore up a system that is failing many of it's stakeholders far too frequently. Massive overhaul required.

In my book, that does not mean privatisation, but movement to something like the French system. Break up the massive monolith behemoth that the NHS has become, introduce some real patient and staff choice about what conditions under which to be treated or work in, ensure that those who are in financial need aren't excluded through subsidy/state payment of insurance policies, introduce some small charges for some (but not all) people to help depress demand and boost supply.

However, under a Tory government none of that is going to happen. They'll tinker til it breaks, whilst privatising on the sly, and do nothing to break up monopolies. Then some huge crisis will be engineered and we'll get a botched privitisation railroaded through.

We'll end up with an NHS privatised in a similar fashion to the railways e.g. it will get much more expensive at point of access, with no more choice and no improvement in services.

wissleflower The reality is that with a starting salary a smidgeon above 22kk, trainee doctors are actually not very well paid (as stated in the op). To get there involves a minimum of 5 years study and student debt.

The reality of this new contract is that doctors won't be able to afford the pay cuts (could you afford 30% pay cut?) And will move abroad, where pay and conditions are much better.

Trainee solicitors don't even have a recommended minimum salary any more. Before it was abolished in 2014, it was £18,590 in central London and £16,650 elsewhere. No-one really knows the exact figures paid or the hours worked, but only the national minimum wage (£11,830 per annum) applies.

Its a similar concern in other professional fields (except engineering I think) - downgrading of salary and conditions (you are always expected to work unpaid overtime, previously the salary used to compensate), whereas other fields requiring less onerous entry requirements and study attract higher salaries, as they move with the times. I know fully qualified solicitors working full-time in the public sector for £23,500 pa and plenty of unfilled posts.

I suspect in reality that relatively few will move abroad, but what you will get is not the best candidates going into medicine and law, but the ones with the wealthiest families. Which is damaging to society as a whole. But highlighting the issue is well nigh impossible in the present economic climate, because you run into very socialist views which say that because some lawyers and doctors can earn a lot of money, they don't need help over salary and conditions. I think there are a lot of jobs that are overpaid for the qualifications and work required - tube drivers, for example. Certain other non-degree qualified, male-dominated jobs.

blackclouds teachers DO work Saturdays and sometimes Sunday's for fixtures for no extra pay or TOIL. In state schools. I know English teachers in other state schools near me also working Saturdays for exam prep. No extra money or days off.

Sorry for the minor derail.

My sister has just quit her job as a GP. She's going to do something with much less pay and fewer hours instead. The financial rewards (nowhere near as great as you imagine) are not worth the ridiculous hours she is expected to work. She never sees her children and has had enough. When she asked to work flexibly they laughed in her face. So that's 10 years of training and hundreds of thousands of pounds down the drain.