to wish doctors weren't going on strike

[MissTriggs]

After 5 months of misdiagnoses, being sent to the wrong person, explaining why suggestions weren't helpful, holding my GP's hand and fighting to get to the right person I'm now booked in to have the test I need on 2nd December, the day after the strike.

If my test was on 1st December I'd be pretty upset

I then read a post on here from a junior doctor claiming s/he could make more money "as a manager at Greggs" and that tipped me over the edge.

I saw lots of posts from doctors saying they already work weekends but it turns out they get paid extra for this at present.

I think doctors have no idea what it is to work in a job where you can be sacked easily, where you don't know whether work is coming in from day to day, where your employers have no interest in getting you back to work after a career break and where you either have no pension or the value of your pension can fall from year to year and be worth nothing.
I also think they don't realise that, whilst a generation ago doctors might have been unusual in working antisocial hours, nowadays all professionals are expected to be available all the time.

I might be wrong, but I don't think I'm being unreasonable here.

Just a caveat for everyone saying that a career in law will always be better remunerated - not necessarily, and definitely not for people going into the legal aid sector.

We are very frequent flyers of NHS!!!
DS2 is severely disabled and DH has MS.
We want our Jr. dr to learn and process info!!!! Pay them their worth!!!!

Although there is one at west Suffolk hospital on paediatric team who should just be fired!!!

First of all, sorry that you have a medical issue but i am glad that you are being taken care of, for free at the point of service, many people in the World are not so lucky.

As for the rest of your op:

Yabu, ignorant (sorry) and self-centred. Thank goodness you don't get to decide on this matter.

"I think doctors have no idea what it is to work in a job where you can be sacked easily, where you don't know whether work is coming in from day to day, where your employers have no interest in getting you back to work after a career break and where you either have no pension or the value of your pension can fall from year to year and be worth nothing."

You are comparing apples and pears. Doctors have spends tens of thousand for their education, and studied hard for many years to serve the public. I am grateful to them (as I am to teachers, police officers etc.)

People I know who are GPs work very, very hard, say 8-8 every day but don't get paid for the hours after 5, so three hours unpaid OT. During a typical working day they see patients back to back from 8-6 with sometimes very disturbing situations. They have to make life or death decisions etc, etc, etc.

I support their strike and so should you.

YABU.

This strike is the first step in the fight to save the NHS.

Nurses and AHP's next, I hope.

Gruntled

Indeed. It's like saying schools are run by teachers ....

I don't believe that people in comparable private sector jobs are worse off than public sector workers.
There has been a public sector pay freeze for 5 years now.

I went to university with a diverse range of people who are not medics but who I would say are my 'peer group'. I am way less rich and successful in material terms than most of them. My uni friends who are eg lawyers, work in finance, the oil industry and the civil service are all much better renumerated with benefit packages far in excess of anything I could dream of.

There is routine discussion of gym memberships, expense accounts, travel allowances, company cars, relocation packages and bonuses. I am regaled with tales of the office Christmas party at a big name restaurant all expenses paid. In the NHS there is none of that and you buy your own biscuits and organise your own Christmas party.

I don't care about or want any of that stuff and I do realise that the academics, publishers, teachers and journalists are also not getting all this stuff but I just find it hard to believe that private sector workers are so hard done by when I don't see it in my own circle.

I fully support the doctors going on strike, you should have done it years ago. Nurses should join you.

I remember when I was nursing having to hide the SHOs in the isolation room just to make sure they got a couple of hours sleep on their psych rotations. They had to cover 3 different hospital sites, often for 48 hours on call, alone. It was a disgusting state of affairs then, and it's even worse now.

Honestly, it doesn't really take much of a genius to work out that people who become doctors aren't really the type to gratuitously strike just to piss off a stupendously ill informed Health Secretary. Or a similarly ridiculous member of the public. If you want to understand things, go and get yourself informed, preferably before you make a complete arse of yourself on MN.

Cor blimey. The ignorance spouted here is a Tory's wet dream.

OP: who do you think knows the most about what is best? 37,000+ junior doctors, or a politician who believes in homeopathy and wants to privatise the NHS?

I mean, really! Be doesn't even pretend to be impartial.

I fully support the Junior Doctors,
Jeremy Hunt needs a shunt
In Septenber I had a scheduled operation on a Saturday. The surgeon was on duty all weekend and one of his team was around throughout the night and during the Sunday, poor guy looked ill himself through tiredness.
Also cannot fault the nurses who were brilliant.

I totally support the strike.

I wish people would actually informs themselves about why they are striking rather than listening to the bollocks Hunt spouts.

They already work weekends
They would get an 11% pay cut in effect
They could be made to work ridiculous long hours with no penalties for employers.
They spent years and money getting to be a doctor, of course they deserve appropriate pay.

People need to back the doctors, nurses and AHPs who are trying to improve things before the NHS implodes or is sold off bit by bit under Hunt.

I've got a question - there are two systems which limit doctors hours. One - the banding system, relates to the way they are contracted and paid which is the issue in dispute as I understand it. The other system, which has lower hours limits ie a limit of 48 hours of work on average per week, is European regulation which we have adopted.

As far as I am aware, the government hasn't opted out of Working Time Regulations and these limits remain in place. So why are doctors so worried about hours increasing? If a hospital breaches WTR, it can be punished by a fine of £5k every time the breach happens, which would cost them more than breaching the banding system (although the doctors get the money if they breach the banding system and it goes to the government if they breach WTR).

YABU ( very very U) Simple .. thats all

When I saw this post my heart sunk!! Having read the thread my poor wee heart is warmed and I'm delighted people are finally speaking out about the way NHS staff are treated.

I would highlight a very important fact that joe public forget ... NHSstaff are also patients!! They have families and friends that are patients, do you really believe they would strike for the sake of working a few extra hours?? They are finally nurses have failed to do it for years standing together to try and save the NHS and hopefully now people will listen instead of blaming them

As I understand it Hunts proposal gets rid of the financial penalties relating to WTD dulcee

Thank you to everyone who is supporting us.
I'm a junior doctor (in my late 30s with 3 children)
I won't reiterate the points as they've been made so well up thread.
My story is that I feel like I hardly see the kids- maybe 2 evenings a week. I see my husband one evening a week if we're lucky but we're both bloody exhausted (he's a Dr too) he's been sent to a hospital 2 hours away so doesn't see the kids in the week (or every other weekend as he's in emergency care)
No nurseries/ after school clubs are open past 6pm and we can't afford a nanny so we have a 17 year old covering for us after nursery closes etc. she is out of her depth but I have no other options. It's a complete mess and I hate it.
I must have the only consultant that doesn't support the strike and told me to consider my duty/ think of my reputation etc. (basically threatened that I should not go on strike)

So let's inform them rather than being cross. It feels frustrating when we don't want to be striking in the first place- it wasn't us that wanted new contracts- and life as a junior Dr especially if trying to bring up kids ( missing bedtimes, school plays, Christmas anyone?) can be miserable but we don't do ourselves any favours being grumpy. It is very hard to find neutral info to read. Each side has an agenda.

exactly! thanks for this and for your time.

Rainbow - I'm sorry your consultant is an arse. The vast majority are very supportive.

I wish doctors weren't going on strike too. But I don't blame them, not one tiny bit.

The point is who is actually going to hold hospitals to account for breaches?

At present the hours monitoring system is mandatory on the employers and the Drs. It is built in and the penalties are automatically applied if the rota is in breach of the requirements after 2 monitoring exercises is it is a high threshold anyway and very rarely awarded.

I think you are implying that Drs just want this money in their pockets. The idea that anyone is routinely trying to get Band 3 is misguided as it is almost impossible to do. It is awarded to everyone on a rota not to an individual so it is not easy to game it at all. It functions as a deterrent not a way to get paid extra.

If the mandatory system is taken away it will be up to an individual junior Dr to complain and to demonstrate that their hours are excessive. These guys are the smallest cog in a very powerful organisation, medicine is a very hierarchical profession, they are already tired and stressed starting out I a very stressful job. They will not complain and employers will get away with it. Even in the current system I have seen with my own eyes how Drs are leant on to under report their hours. If anyone dares to challenge it they will have a very real fear of being blacklisted and seen as a troublemaker.

The proposal is to remove a mandatory safeguard put in place for patient safety and to leave just the normal employment rights that anyone in any job has. Do the airline industry do this?

MissTriggs

May I ask that when you quote other people, you make it clear in some way?

Rainbow - please strike if you want to - your reputation will not be tarnished - after all you won't be the only only striking!!

I'm a locum GP & as it happens have no work booked for any of the strike days. I shan't be accepting any either.

It seems to me that the out of hours payments are being seen by the OP as "Doctors demanding more money" when actually what previous people with knowledge of this area are saying is that the payments are more to provide a dis-incentive to the hospital trusts to just schedule doctors for 100 hour weeks. The money is to take some of the sting out of doctors being forced to work more than the 40 hour working week most of the rest of us get.

It sounds like peak-travel pricing on trains, you dont have enough capacity to everyone to travel when theyd prefer, so you increase the price. The people for who its really important pay the premium, everyone else waits until the cheaper off-peak times. If you made all tickets off-peak, the rail network simply wouldnt cope with the volume of people.

I'm a consultant. I have actively been encouraging my juniors to strike. Many of them are reluctant because they are worried about the patients and they feel it probably won't do any good and worry it will alienate the public (or so they tell me, perhaps they were afraid I would tell them off if they said they were striking).

For 1 day with cover as at Christmas ie emergencies and on call system only we will manage.
I have cancelled a clinic so that I can do the ward work which is a shame for those people who had waited to see me but hey can be rescheduled within 2-4 weeks.

If it carries on then the backlog will build up and it will affect patients more but that's up to our Jeremy.

I put 3 pretend examples into the NHS employers calculator at random and they have come out with pay rises of 9.8%, 13.6% and 27.3% (in total pay including overtime). Have I done something wrong in it?