To think that nurses do very well financially actually

[Nurseybigbucks]

Hear me out.
I know that people are always going on about shitty nurses salary and how hard they work etc and believe me, I get that the job is often shit and getting shitter and they have to work hard, but I can't get behind them being low paid.

My DP has recently qualified as a nurse, she was lucky in that NHS paid for her degree, now that's stopped it does make a difference but this low pay nurse thing has been spouted for longer than it's been stopped.

She's just started her first job out of Uni on a salary of £30,000 for the NHS. This is above national average salary but closer to average in our area (London). She gets paid extra for night shifts and weekends or bank holidays so the total she'd earn would be around £35k in year 1.

There are not many jobs paying £35k in year one out of Uni, certainly not from courses that are so easy to access in terms of what you need to be accepted onto the courses.

And that's just for a basic (band 5) nurse. If you have something about you then you'll move up to a higher pay band within a couple of years max really and there are lots of higher paid jobs for the right personnel and LOTs of opportunity to upskill and earn more and LOTs of opportunity to work extra should you choose, with private work being particularly lucrative.

I earn around £50k in finance but expect to be the lower earner within 5 years or so.

Again, I get how hard they might work, but lots of people work hard and hard work vs pay is not a linear graph in any career.

I think that nurses are pretty well and fairly paid and they enjoy a fantastic pension if working in the NHS. So Mumsnet, AIBU?

As @Sirzy says Practice Nursing is a lottery. You are at the mercy of the GP partners. You aren’t on the AfC paybands and they can pay you pretty much whatever they like. They will tell you that in turn for ‘family friendly working hours’ you should be ok with your skills, experience and training being hugely undervalued and underpaid. Cheeky fuckers. There are a few who value the role nurses play in primary care and pay them either at afc rates or above but they are few and far between.

Sorry not @Sirzy, I meant @Sidge

£30k is a good starting salary-though that is in London.

And why are people nit-picking over a discrepancy of just £1000 when people apparently get the exact figure wrong?

It's not not picking to point out that people are quoting a figure which is incorrect by more than £1200. If we are discussing salaries, it surely makes sense to point out that a incorrect figure is being used Maybe it's 'just' £1214 to you, but that's a lot of money to many people.

after some serious thinking au could justify the £65k debt I'd gone out in and be on less than I earn now.

But as a nurse you'd come nowhere near paying all of that back.

I would expect my DP to be band 7 within 5 years, that is senior sister level

You can expect all you want but it’s highly likely you’ll be sorely disappointed.

And why shouldn’t we have a decent salary after university?

You should. You're worth every penny. I'm not sure anyone would disagree. The gist of the OPs post is that nurses aren't badly paid as the common narrative goes. I have to say, I hadn't realised the graduate salary was at that level. It's higher than the average graduate pay for my professional construction degree.

Does your partner not agree with you or something so you've decided to post on here to see if anyone else will?

CBBTRTWT (not sure if that’s been used on mn before, but the cbb=can’t be bothered) because your starting point OP is one of total naivety.

Explain to me how your dd on a ‘hefty’ £35/yr is ever going to get on the property ladder in London? Or even enough to pay for childcare, while she rents?

I’ve been in the NHS for 20 years, as a doctor. I would PAY my daughter NOT to do nursing. It’s hideously badly paid, the individual risk (of abuse -both verbal and physical- and of making a mistake and being sued/struck off) grows every year, there is very little opportunity to climb the ranks...I could go on.
It is the one thing I would not want my daughter to do.

My dd is a nurse and works very hard long shifts and is on 24K so no not high wages after spending 3 years at uni...

Luckily she loves being a nurse and has a ambition to climb that ladder...i take my hat of to nurses they do a job that i just don't want do

As an extra bit of joy you literally deal with life, death, every bodily fluid you can think of, sometimes angry (sometimes understandably) relatives. Few other professionals have to deal with that, hard work comes in many forms, but nursing for the physical and emotional demands of the job is pitiful. Carers and HCA's also are, and the 'people will do it because it's a vocation' safety net they've had for years is disappearing

agree with this too, sometimes i see a lot of emotion on my dd face when she has a tough day...at 21 she is incredible

YABU.
I'm a nurse. I've been qualified for 29 years. I work on a really demanding ward for elderly people with complex medical needs. Lots of dementia, lots of end-of-life care. I love it.
I'm on FTE £31,000 plus unsocial enhancements. Some of my junior colleagues only take home £1350 a month.
I would actually get paid less than I currently do if I was a grade higher: I would get hardly any unsociable hour enhancements and higher pension contributions.
YABU.

good luck with that op.
In my trust it seems to be who you know not what you know for advancement.
Im currently doing more work than my colleagues on a higher banding as they don't meet the criteria for their posts but got them due to a restructuring process that half our dept couldn't apply for, yet we met the criteria 🤷‍♀️
Hence myself and my colleagues are working our notice.

Getting to band 7 in 5 years is not the norm, ok is delusional if they think it is a given.

I would expect my DP to be band 7 within 5 years, that is senior sister level

lol - all the higher band positions are being reduced and the numbers are being made up with the new, much lower-paid and less qualified, auxiliary nurse positions. Promotion prospects for nurses are shrinking with fewer people doing the management roles but at much higher levels of stress and responsibility.

My DP goes into work dreading it every time in case something goes wrong and one of the corners that they all HAVE to cut in order for people not to die gets pinned on her and that will be it - job and career killed in one fell swoop, plus potential charges on top of that. It's shit, which is why she has drastically cut down her hours and why nurses are leaving in record numbers.

If you expect to be the lower earner in the next 5 years working in finance and currently on 50k a year then I can assure you that won’t be the case. Top of scale band 7 is on less than 50k a year, I’m a band 5 nurse in Scotland and my very experienced colleagues who have worked in the profession for years, done various levels of study right up to masters are not higher than band 7, very few nursing roles are. I agree it’s a good starting salary but takes a lot of further study to ever make more than average.

During my degree I had to work 24 hours a week on top of placements which are full time, just to have enough to live on.

Not trying to ‘top trumps’ you, but during mine I had to work forty hours a week on top of full time placements. Plus academic work. Literally eighty hours of working per week. It’s a hard slog, not unique to nursing though! I’d have killed for a 60-65 hour week.

To the poster who said NHS staff deserve a pay rise, we recently got a really good one :) my own band saw a 30% pay rise. Which was fantastic and much appreciated. Not expecting another for a while haha. Couldn’t believe our luck when the three year pay deal was agreed, it’s been fantastic.

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/08/nhs-workers-agree-pay-rise-three-years

Again, not saying it’s not deserved. But I don’t know of many other sectors where you’re almost guaranteed a pay rise every year for the first eight years in post even if you stay in the same job. A matter of perspective I guess as I spent a decade on NMW, working for the NHS has improved my financial security massively.

I'm getting the impression from various posters that the opportunities away from London are nothing like we have in the capital.

No shit, Sherlock.

Like all MN threads involving money, there’ll be posters who think £25-30k is peanuts and those who can only dream of ever making above £20k. Which I guess is where all of the impassioned debate arises from. I can’t imagine ever considering a £24k starting salary and guaranteed £30k even if you remain in the same banding your entire career being ‘poorly paid’.

I don't think 35k is enough considering the work nurses do - and as others have said it, most nurses don't start on that anyway. I made more than 35k straight out of college, also in finance (so if you're on 50k still that tells me you could be doing better yourself!). I don't think for a minute that the work I did there was in any way as valuable nor as difficult as what nurses do. If we're not going to pay them a salary that is commensurate to their contribution to society, at least we should have the decency of hiring enough of them so their job isn't miserable because they don't have the time to care for patients the way they'd like to.

@TwinsTrollsandHunz at last someone who gets my point!!!!!!! Finally!

Minty outside of the UK it isn’t a starting salary, I’m on just over £30,000 after 11 years service

Oops, meant to say outside of London, in the rest of the UK

To the poster who said NHS staff deserve a pay rise, we recently got a really good one smile my own band saw a 30% pay rise. Which was fantastic and much appreciated. Not expecting another for a while haha. Couldn’t believe our luck when the three year pay deal was agreed, it’s been fantastic.

Your band didn't get a 30% rise it got a 6.5% rise like everyone else. The government tried to claim that some people were getting up to 30% rise by including their incremental rise in the equation. They would have had the incremental rise without the pay deal anyway. My pay packet was literally the same once the rise had been applied. 6.5 % over 3 years was an insult.

It isn’t always easy to get to be a band 7. If you work in a hospital with 20 wards you will have 20 Band 7 sisters, but hundreds of band 5 nurses. Yes, there will also be specialist roles at band 7 but not significant numbers.

It’s still a case of dead man’s shoes....waiting for someone to leave. There are plenty of band 5 nurses who are more than capable of being a junior sister or sister but either don’t have the opportunity or don’t want to. I get the latter is their choice but we do need decent band 5 nurses on the actual wards.

FormerlyFrikadela01

I started at the bottom of band seven. Over the three years, the pay deal meant a rise of approx 30%. I don’t see the issue that they included the incremental rises in that figure personally as it’s still a pay rise, even if we’d have gotten a proportion of that anyway, the fact remains that bottom band sevens were given a 30% rise over the three year deal. I didn’t mean 30% in a single rise, should have specified it was 30% over three years.

Unless something has changed drastically since I last checked!