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?

Every female GP I know works part time hours (I know 4 amongst the parents at school) so clearly it is possible.

Scary, what, they actually go into school and teach a class on a Sunday?

Not once before an exam but as a regular thing?

And yes, many GPs are part time - I know a few as well.

Lots of Doctors who work part time still work 40+ hours a week .
Part time just limits it from being more than this, and saves the Government money.

I don't think anyone is really telling young people what the working conditions are like - otherwise getting into medical school might be less competitive.

I fail to see how 'many GPs are part time' is relevant here!

The OP is talking about doctors in training, roughly, the average doctor on qualification is in this position anywhere between 5-12 years depending on chosen speciality.
So you leave medschool at 23 and, for up to 12 years, you're on a training pay scale. Those years are when most need a wage which will enable them to rent/get a mortgage, get married, have kids and not to mention, start repaying the huge debts accumulated. In a training post, you will be subject to various professional fees and exams- can be several thousands per year.

I just don't agree that the banding should be cut. It's not ridiculously generous as it stands. God knows how juniors in London survive.

Many consultants and GPs work part time, although 'part time' is probably the equivalent of nearly full time in other professions.
I'm a part time GP having just had a baby and although I work 3 days, this amounts to 36 hours plus having to keep up to date with an additional 3-4 hours of work in my own time each week.

Rewind the clock and ask me to go into GP now? No way! And, without sounding like a complete idiot, I'm a valued, hardworking and popular GP in my practice. It's sad that the govt is driving away those doctors with a real passion for medicine and for those patients we treat. Well done Cameron.

It isn't relevant but someone up the thread said it didn't happen and people are responding to that!

Sorry - looks like I missed the point...!

I'd be interested to see what traceybarlow's sister wanted in terms of flexibility from her job..?
(But equally don't want to completely derail this thread!)

I'm a teacher and I can say wholeheartedly doctors have a much harder job than teachers and are certainly not in a cushy job at all! I don't begrudge other public sector workers having good (I'm loathe to say 'better' as this isn't a competition) party and working conditions and I support them 100% in fighting against Tory cuts. We're not of the "well I don't get XYZ so why should they?" train of thought.

aye I think your interpretation of the op is flawed, everything in it is correct.

Fwiw, there are juniors who earn 22k, if they work an unbanded job. It would be unusual to do this for the entire year, but perfectly normal for one job to be unbanded, meaning 4 months on 22k.

The public should care about the change to the contract, even if they don't care about doctors, as:

1. doctors are already emigrating in droves, as well as changing careers. At least 10% of the doctors I graduated with 2 years ago are no longer working for the NHS.
2. service provision will suffer due to staff shortages
3. this will all lead to privatisation through the back door.

Wissle I know a fair few junior doctors and none of them have earned less than ~30k in FY1.

For thise who say teachers don't work weekends - I am an FE teacher and I have taught Saturday mornings and evening classes up until 9.00 pm. Pay rate is the same

Those not thise obviously

aye I know many who did earn less than that.

To earn the figure you quote would require all 3 jobs at 1b banding.

They really, really do Wissle.

If you know a single doctor whose gross pay was 22k then they will be a massive exception and must have taken some time out.

Even taking one rotation on each banding it's ~29.5k. And that's only for the first year.

For those who think it doesn't matter, who exactly do you want to look after your loved ones? Personally I want the best and brightest to go on to be doctors. ????I don't want the people who weren't quite bright enough to be vets, dentists, lawyers bankers etc. because that is exactly what will happen if pay and conditions get worse. ????Dh is a consultant now so past this stage, but his hours are pretty horrific and that doesn't include all the time spent at home studying and preparing teaching sessions or the phone calls when he's not on call. ????But it's ok for us, there are loads of countries where pay and conditions are lots better so if we needed to we could move. I bet lots of doctors feel the same, I wonder where that will leave the nhs. ????

Anyone can google doctor pay scales and see what we earn. We do earn good money, but with good reason. I can't think of any other profession that requires so many years of training and so many exams/hurdles. It also requires resilience and an ability to cope with illness and death day in and day out. And don't forget the fear of being sued by someone for missing a diagnosis that you had 5 mins to spot with a vague history and normal examination

Aye - it is misleading to say that we earn up to 70K before banding - I am on ST7 pay which (for most specialties) is one grade below consultant pay. I earn about £41500 basic. Way off 70K

The issue with Jeremy's plan for us is the drastic pay cut. We all live within our means, and for anyone's pay to sudden drop by a third is barbaric - whatever your profession. It's demoralising and grossly unfair. If the same thing happened to teachers or nurses it would be equally devastating for them and their families

It's the beginning of the end of the NHS if the government is allowed to treat us in this way. Nurses will be next. Their pay is too low as it is, to remove their out of hours supplement is cruel

Thank you to everyone who is supporting us - and fortunately there do seem to be a lot of people who understand the problem we are facing. We are a massive workforce, and if we lose our morale we will be off to Australia or off work with depression. No junior doctors makes for a very scary world for patients. A&E will collapse and the rest of the NHS will follow

Forgive me if this point has already been made; but to all those saying that 'other roles/professions work evenings and weekends with no enhanced rate why should doctors?' I would suggest you look at the difference in what the job entails. If someone working in retail works on a Saturday their job is more or less the same as a Tuesday. Their role, level of responsibility and break entitlements are the same. When I work a Saturday as a medical SHO I am one of only 4 doctors caring for all the patients in hospital under medical specialties (that's respiratory/cardiology/elderly care etc) and all the new admissions. It Amounts to hundreds. During a normal day there are 3-5 doctors per ward. On my last weekend I reviewed all the new patients from the previous day with a consultant, saw all the new admissions to the hospital and decided on their treatment (they are next seen by a consultant the following day), I put people on to machines to assist their breathing, dealt with a patient who had become so sick they needed to go to intensive care. I attended two cardiac arrests and reviewed a lady with cancer who had deteriorated. I spoke to her family and made the decision not to resuscitate her if her heart stopped. All this alongside the mundane day to day work. I did that for 3 consecutive 12 hour shifts, on top of my normal weeks either side of the weekend. I had approx 20 min break each day. Now tell me that it isn't fair that I expect to be paid more for my unsocial hours. It's not just that they are interfering with my social life (I don't have one-I have a toddler), it's that the job is a very different one out of hours.

blackcloud every PE teacher at my school and in the four schools local area to us (and many further afield- our school needs other schools to play against!) take fixtures every single Saturday morning throughout Autumn and Spring term.

English teachers I know doing Saturday classes were in a classroom, teaching lessons for three hours on a Saturday. Main stream, comprehensive schools, not exclusively exam prep as it was taking place from September. I know our music and and drama teachers regularly work weekends for rehearsals.

Well it doesn't happen round here!

Autumnfan, in my opinion you shouldn't be left in that position.

There should be more doctors on at the weekend, that is what we need to aim for.

Not leaving one doctor in charge of hundreds of people but saying "it's okay because they get paid time and a half so it's worth it to them financially".

Doctors are paid well, but the hours they need to do to earn that are crazy and probably border on unsafe. They should work fewer hours, say a max of 48 hours a week, and there should be more of them so the shifts are better.

And I don't really like the comparisons with other jobs, but speaking up for retail, there would probably be a huge difference in retail on a Tuesday and a Saturday, Saturday would be about 10 times as busy, as it's the weekend. The retail worker wouldn't get paid extra for helping 10 times the number of customers either.

Disclaimer: I am NOT saying that there is any comparison in the skills/training between doctors retail workers. But that's why they are on minimum wage and doctors earn good money.

Fair post Aye

I have worked in the NHS for over 30 years.

I remember the days when there was no overtime pay for any doctors, and as a nurse you got time and a quarter for night duty.

Junior doctors worked roughly 120 hours per week - a 1 in 2 as it used to be known. You started work at 8.00 Monday morning and worked solidly till around 10pm Tuesday evening. Then you grabbed a bit of sleep and were back again at 8.00 on Wednesday and worked solidly until 10pm Thursday evening. Back again 8.00 Friday morning until 10pm Friday evening. If you were lucky and it was your weekend off, you could go home and collapse until Monday morning. If it was your weekend on call, you stayed put in the hospital working all day and all night until 10pm Monday night.

Nights and weekends on call were paid at one quarter of the hourly rate per hour as it was assumed that you would only work 1 hour out of every 4.

It was dangerous and we absolutely cannot go back to those kind of conditions.

Aye-you are right about increasing numbers, and I don't think you'd find many doctors who'd disagree with you. The government are not prepared to fund that though, because it's not just more doctors we need. It's more of everything.

As far as working at the weekend vs during the week is concerned I get to speak from experience on this. Having worked as a sales assistant, a care assistant in a residential home and a civil servant for the DVLA, there is no comparison.

The recognition that skills/training is different is, however, appreciated more than you might imagine-I say that without irony. You'd be surprised how often that is considered irrelevant.

I don't get why we don't train more doctors. And employ more at weekends so that hospitals aren't run on such a skeleton. Give people better options for part-time work and so on.

There are literally hundreds of people with good enough grades turned away from medical school every year. I can understand that maybe some of them don't have the right temperament/aptitude, but surely a fair proportion of them would.

I do understand that it would cost more to train more, but surely the amount people pay in tuition fees now woudl cover at least some of it.

I don't think that the general public are going to be that concerned about junior doctors salary as although they aren't that great they certainly go on to get very high salaries when they are more senior.
However, the proposal to remove certain safeguards over lack of breaks & working over contracted hours should be a huge concern. Many of my friends had to work ridiculous hours when they were junior doctors e.g. 100 hours a week. As well as being bad for them it was very unsafe for patients and I'm sure it led to a lot of mistakes. It would be terrible if we went back to that.