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?

Lightness The government being the only employer is just as true for pharmacists, nurses, etc as it is for doctors and those other professions have already been screwed down to rock bottom while the doctors enjoyed the benefits of their contracts and their leaders ignored requests for help claiming it was outwith their control and best for efficiency, etc. It was only a matter of time till they got the doctors too
It would just be nice if doctors had stood for other healthcare professions as they now hope we will do for them but I guess that is water under the bridge now and I think this contract change will be to the detriment of all of us if it goes through

I have to agree with those saying teaching is not in any way comparable and that is coming from someone with family working in both areas

Sorry calm that is completely wrong as Drs have been exploited for years . They used to do 56 continuous hours work as one shift over a weekend on call then onto work again for the rest of the week. Totals of 150 hours per week. Nurses , Pharmacists, Porters and Domestics have never , literally never done this. The first time Drs terms and conditions improved was when the EWTD came in...as it was the law, HR and management have had to comply. If we lose monitoring and current safety guards management and HR will bend the rules even more than they do now. So your statements about others in the NHS having poor t&c while we stand idly by bears no relation to reality whatsoever.

And anyway there is no point squabbling between different NHS workers.

The point is, JuniorDrs who are already overworked and underpaid, undervalued and unsupported and routinely daily save lives of hospital inpatients, while frequently exhausted , are being told that from 2016 August they are going to have safety precautions relating to overwork taken away, and they will be valued less for their out of hours work which is hugely difficult and stressful and understaffed, and devalued in general. We don't expect people to understand or care. It's up to us to fight the govt every step of the way and we don't need to explain or apologise.
The govt in England are idiots. Don't they even care when Drs go no one can replace them? Seriously , no one. Physicians associates.. will they be putting your chest drain in in the middle of the night? No. It's us that do the job and no one else can. It's time they got real. Bastards.

Am leaving this discussion.
On my time off I have got a life to lead. Its pointless trying to explain to non medics because no one ever gets it.

I'm a nurse and this is one of the first times I have seen my colleagues and other allied professionals rallying to support our medical colleagues. The Tory government are attacking doctors in a grievous way and it's the public who will suffer. If the daily mail would report on half of the amazing, life changing work that we carry out as a team every day, perhaps more people would be backing the medical proffession.

It's not a race to the bottom, we shouldn't be trying to make working conditions worse for everyone, rather the opposite.

I've always had tons of support from the nurses I've worked with, and I hope that they felt the same way too. There's only so far any one staff group can go to help another's terms and conditions, as we are only allowed to take industrial action for a change that affects our own contracts.

As an aside, when I was an unbanded newly qualified FY1 doctor (yes, they do exist), I showed the nurses and physios on my ward my payslip. While I can't recall the exact words they used, the main gist was "I'm so sorry - I had no idea..."

Rumour has it Scotland won't be imposing the new contract, and possibly Wales too. If this is the case I would seriously consider moving to either - much less disruptive than going to Aus/NZ and both have struggled with recruitment so they may do well out of this.

Wales are not imposing it.

It wasn't so much T&Cs I was referring to as pay Lightness, I know my salary is a far smaller proportion of a GP salary now than it was back when I qualified and mine is still diminishing. I'm lucky to work for the NHS as the rate, working for private companies contracting to it, has gone down around £3/hr over the last 5 years. I think to say "non-medics will never understand" is rather dismissive of those of us who work side by side with medics every day as I have for the last 30 years but you are entitled to your own opinion on that.

I do absolutely agree with Geraldine that we all need to stand together on this one and just hope that unity carries through to supporting all healthcare professionals moving forward from here

Standing together sounds better calm.

My children are/have been in private schools where doctor and lawyer, accountant, dentist are the preferred careers for many of the teenagers and their parents. What is likely to happen if doctor's pay and terms become unacceptable is those bright students will pick different careers so eventually the market will decide. Mind you if there are 1m Syrians who would like to work here a good few of whom are fluent in English and qualified doctors I am not sure we would necessarily have a shortage.

Fighting the govt doesn't usually work very well as they have the power to change laws. Doesn't make it fair though. We will oppose it. If it turns out to go through and Drs leave and the govt has been warned then we couldn't have done more. What happens in the future NHS is the govts call not ours they are calling the shots we just do the work.

If other professionals ,trained Drs or less highly trained workers are substituted into our roles that's not really our problem..the point is they have a ready trained hardworking highly skilled workforce they are currently shafting.

Well...no comment about the changes in the contract for junior docs....
But just have to comment on shortages and doctors emigrating. Maybe we don't just need to worry about junior doc shortages
My consultant has just taken 'early retirement' - gone off to work in Australia. The reason (and I quote) 'I'm leaving before Nicola takes all my pension'
(Yes I am in Scotland - and Nicola is Nicola Sturgeon...)

Of course, we had the pension changes imposed previously stealing the pension payout, and then the 'seven day NHS ' row and now this . Consultant contract also in talks. BMA withdrew from talks on the junior Dr contract as it was so unreasonable they would not discuss it. Sadly the govt just said ok we'll just institute it then.

It's not a race to the bottom, we shouldn't be trying to make working conditions worse for everyone, rather the opposite. very we'll said Geraldine.

Tory governments plan to dismantle the NHS to leave the spoils for the private sector is unfortunately going rather well.
People need to wake up or else they'll be paying 10x the cost for an inferior service as they do in the states.

I think it can be hard to explain the problem to non-medics without getting sidetracked or confusing the issue. I came across this blog (not mine) which I think explains the issues far better than anything else I've read.

Jrdr.blog.com

jrdr.blog.com

Try again. That should link properly, sorry.

By consultant brother was advised this week by a good financial adviser to work to minimise his hours and pay otherwise there will be very dire financial consequences - presumably some kind of pension cap will kick in! So his earnings outside of the NHS (which are many times his NHS pay) are the ones the system is incentivising him to increase which is fairly warped.

Wildfire, that blog deserves to be posted in full!
V eloquently put, crucially pointing out the dire consequences for the NHS and the public at large in the long run. It is quite frightening

My DH has never done any private work, but does many an extra NHS waiting list at weekends. Yes, he gets paid for that extra work, but not at any kind of 'antisocial hours' rate. And it has come to the detriment of our family life. He is now considering his options as there really is little point once the (unilaterally and imposed) cut pension pot is full.
Many drs are making the same choices, experienced ones in their 50s are retiring and there is a significant dearth in trainees in many specialities including Primary Care.

The BMA are a useless 'union', they have no teeth and I am not sure what their negotiating powers actually are.

The starting salary for a newly qualified band 5 nurse or ODP is£21,692. We also get up to x2 our hourly rate for unsociable hours on call attended.

In my opinion a junior doctor shouldn't be starting on £22,000, I totally agree with the BMA and OP

It's so tricky isn't it. I'm a teacher and we've been on a pay freeze for at least 5 years now. And I was at work Saturday morning.
I do think that the job of a doctor is more important than a teachers. Obviously teachers are important but if I forget to tell the kids that argon is a noble gas, no one is getting hurt.

However I also feel sorry for friends who work in the civil service who will be making massive redundancies in the coming months and therefore will be taking an 100 percent pay cut.

Also I'm sure nurses, police officers etc are all going through a tough time at the minute.

I massively sympathise but don't know what the answer is

And if I was a junior doctor I'd be tempted to go abroad of course

As an allied health professional I am unsure where I stand on this for reasons I will explain below. Also Lightness you are somewhat misinformed about what we have "never done".

1. We lost our antisocial hours payments several years ago (2012). For me to be oncall, on my own, for a 1200 bedded hospital I shall get the princely sum of £10 a night for my expertise. That's before tax. When we were trying to fight this pay cut (it amounted to about 30%) we got absolutely no support from our medic colleagues whatsoever- we were told that you guys negotiate your own contract so wouldn't be involving yourself with ours.

1. We clock up a hell of a lot of hours and consecutive days work without rest. Currently if we do a full time week of work, weekend oncall and carry on working the next week (as we are expected to) we clock up about 93 hours before we get a day off. You aren't the only ones working a lot of hours. We are all missing our lunches, breaks, days off, chronically short staffed and most of us don't have the career progression that doctors have. This is it for us, until we retire or drop. Our pensions have already been decimated whilst doctors have retained a pretty decent pension package.

1. Is it wise for doctors to be undertaking this crusade given the poor public and government perception of the role? I think there is a danger that if you push too hard you are going to seal you own fate here. We will end up with hospitals staffed by highly qualified advanced practitioners and physicians assistants at a fraction of the cost of the medic staffing bill.

Brilliant news for Scotland and Wales if England go for this and they don't. Should do a lot to help with staffing problems.

we were told that you guys negotiate your own contract so wouldn't be involving yourself with ours.

I think this is partially a. because traditionally drs are stupidly apolitical and an attitude 'I'm alright, Jack' is just too easy to assume and b. part of a campaign to 'divide and conquer' by the powers that be. And I can only apologise for my colleagues

s it wise for doctors to be undertaking this crusade given the poor public and government perception of the role? I think there is a danger that if you push too hard you are going to seal you own fate here.
I have to very much disagree on that one: not making once (IMO justified) case out of fear?? That would be wrong on many levels.
Voting with ones feet is already going on with so many junior doctors going abroad (can we remember that 'junior doctor' includes everybody not yet a consultant, so people with, say, 10 years experience under their belt and in their mid-30s?)

I've said it before on MN and in RL, I have frequently in the last 5 to 10 thanked my lucky stars that I am working in Scotland - not that everything is roses here, but it's not just as dire. Yet.