To think most NHS GPs are underpaid

[Marue]

Everyone seems to think that gp s all earn 150k. However both of the gp s I know "only" earn about 10k a day that they work and both have been doing the job 6-8 years.

I say only as quite frankly for the amount of training they have, the serious job they have and the consequences if they get something wrong then it doesn't seem like much. I earn a similar amount once my bonus is added in and I don't have an important job at all and has very little responsibility.

Both the gp s I know do just want to quit, one has recently been through a court case by a bereaved family and was cleared of anything. But has taken up so much of her free time and caused her stress to go through the roof.

either she lies about her age or your friend boasts about her stage and salary a bit?

I agree-either of those seem far more likely than a 24/26 (make your mind up) GP on £98k.

I think GPs deserve a good wage and think they get it. I don't think £30k for three days work is bad at all! I'm another echoing that it is extremely unlikely someone will be a gp at 26 (on that wage too). Are you sure they're not exaggerating?

The fact that you bumped up her age by a couple of years when it became blindingly obvious she couldn't have qualified as a GP, makes it look a little made-up.

itsmine what a load of rubbish Seems more of a time management issue than a clinical knowledge one ime.

When a patient comes to see me with a mole, I decide whether they can be reassured or to refer to dermatology. That is a life and death decision if I miss a melanoma. I can't refer everyone - the hospital system would collapse in a week if we all did that

I see many women a year with non-specific symptoms of bloating and low abdo pain. Most will have IBS or other conditions that are unpleasant but not life-threatening. One or two might have ovarian cancer. Care to be in my shoes deciding how much investigating to do for each patient?

Every day, at this time of year, I see tens of children with a temperature, often very early on in their illness. Most will have a cold. A very small number will have early meningitis. Please come and sit in my chair and decide which is which, in the full knowledge that should I get it wrong a child may die.

I could go on......

She said early on that she had made a mistake about the age.

Precisely saucony. Directing money into existing wage packets won't solve the problem of long hours, massive case loads, legal threats or errors through over load. Money directed into training, recruitment and support however would.

But then the professions that are primarily employed publicly and grievances are well known would generally benefit from exactly the same. It's a shame that argument isn't pushed to the forefront in most of these public disputes since it's likely to get much more support and not pander to the divide and conquer strategy of government.

By some peoples logic we should just pay one gp, one social worker and one teacher a couple of million a year and there'd be no more issues.

It's really not about the money.

£50-£60k for a three day week. I know one of mine does two sessions at the local private hospital on top of that. When we had to cancel a holiday due to severe illness it cost me £30 for my GP to spend less than 90 seconds to sign a completed claim form. She then couldn't find the practice stamp for it and told me to cone back after 3pm. For the equivalent of more than £1000 ph I asked her to put it in the post and she asked me to give reception a stamp. I had a badly injured child in a wheelchair. I'd have loved to have had the balls to tell her she could hand deliver it on a fucking silver tray. I gave them a stamp. They lost my respect.

Beaufortbelle would you like to hazard a guess at the basic funding that a surgery gets per patient per year? I'll come back in 10 minutes with the answer. Any guesses welcome, I'm always fascinated with how much the general public thinks we get funded.

(clue - you couldn't insure a pet for that amount)

I may be wrong but none of the GPs on this thread are complaining about their pay. Just trying to defend their vocation.
If you want to have GPs, you have to pay them enough to persuade junior doctors and students to want to be a GP. Currently it is striking them as a bad deal. The current crop of GPs are retiring in droves. Nobody wants to train to be a GP because they can get better pay and work/ life balance elsewhere in the NHS.

Itsmine the fact that you are linking to lazy journalistic nonsense to back up your point underlines quite clearly your lack of understanding of general practice in the UK.

I don't understand your point brokenmouse. I had to make the cheque payable to the doctor personally, not the,surgery. I thought it was rather disgraceful she asked me for a stamp.

I don't know how much our GP gets for each of us but I do know DH has been three times in the last yen years. I go as rarely as possible and since infancy the DC have been maybe once every couple of years. Everything we have done is usually via BUPA and we write a cheque for the private referral letters payable personally to the NHS GP for a letter she'd write for free if we weren't insured and were having an NHS referral.

No-one replied - clearly lots of people are happy to pontificate on GP money without knowing any details.

A practice gets funded around £80 per year, per patient, no matter how many times they need to be seen. There are other bits and pieces for example top-ups if you have lots of patients in nursing homes and QOF which is performance related, but all of these extras are to reflect extra costs. A practice like mine, which has around 25% of patients who speak limited English gets nothing extra to reflect the significant workload of non-English speakers.

This money has to pay all the staff (clinical, admin, cleaner etc), consumables, burglar alarm, boiler, rates, insurance etc - basically everything except the rent and some of the computer hardware.

So do feel free to ask your local solicitor how much of his or her time you can have for £80. It won't get you a year's worth of legal advice.......

I may be wrong but none of the GPs on this thread are complaining about their pay. Just trying to defend their vocation.

I totally agree with this.

It reminds me of threads attacking teachers for moaning about 'working harder than everyone else' when it is nothing of the sort. Comments like that stem from responses to 'it must be great to work 9-3 and have loads of holidays. My mum was a teacher in the 1970s and didn't ever plan or mark so you don't either and your job is a walk in the park' type comments.

Vintage, aside from the fact that all their other NHS colleagues are marching in protest at their own pay...

Our point is, the current problems for doctors in all parts of the NHS is that the hours are too long and there aren't enough doctors (or nurses, or HCA, etc) on shift at a time to do a proper job.

But yet, every Facebook/twitter post, Dear Jeremy letter etc focuses on pay.

However, Ime once you keep going back with the same complaint, that is what tends to initiate a referral rather than the gps clinical knowledge.

Depends entirely on the clinical complaint. I can think of at least 5 cancers that I have picked up in the last year, by referring when the patient first presented. I can think of several patients where the presentation was not barn door obvious for cancer, but by taking a detailed history I picked out some red flag symptoms and did an urgent referral - in one case, saving a woman's fertility by picking up her gynaecological cancer early enough for her to have less drastic surgery than if it had been missed.

If you really think that we are primarily referrers then you clearly have no chronic diseases. Do you not realise that a patient with, for example, asthma, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, depression and high blood pressure will, in the normal run of things, be managed entirely in primary care with no consultant input? And yes, some of their appointments will be with nurses, but it is the GPs overseeing those nurses and taking full responsibility for their decisions.

Oh, and by the way, for a 3 day week I pay £6800 per year in indemnity insurance as well as around another £1500 in other professional expenses. Yes it's tax deductible, but that is a significant amount of money to pay just for the privilege of going to work.

I want people like itsmine to stop implying that we basically shuffle paper around all day. It's not about the money (which has, by the way, gone down year on year - I earn less than I did 5 years ago, whilst my insurance costs have doubled), it's about the complete lack of goodwill from the general public and the government.

I support my junior colleagues in their protest which is about much, much more than pay. It is about the slide towards the destruction of our NHS.
I'm going to sleep now because I need to be rested to sign all those sick notes tomorrow!
Many thanks to my GP comrades and others for their balanced and intelligent comments. I rarely post on here but couldn't let some of the nonsense spouted on here go unchallenged.

I haven't noticed any GPs complaining that they are underpaid. Or other doctors either. Not wanting a pay cut or worsening working conditions - yes. Doctors salaries are publicly available. If the amount is appealing to anyone then please do join the profession. There are jobs going begging - I'm serious. We can't recruit enough GP trainees or A&E doctors. My department has failed to recruit any new registrars this year - we have tried twice. Yes the money is more than the average wage but people are leaving because of burn out in the NHS. And I see this is nursing colleagues too.

Agree with dancing. We have been trying to recruit for over 6 months and can't find anyone who wants to be a GP. If it really was £250k and spend all week on the golf course (as the Daily Mail would have you believe), I'd imagine we would have a few applicants!

It's only GPs who are practice partners who are highly paid - and obviously they have taken on an element of risk to get to that point. Those who aren't do have salaries that are pretty much comparable with typical professional pay rates.