NHS Pay award

[Thedogscollar]

So this is what they have come back with from the insulting 1% offer by increasing it to a paltry 3%.
Workers are leaving in their droves we have a massive deficit in nursing and midwifery which is worsening daily.

I work in the South East of England, we are hugely affected with shortages in staffing, virtually every 12.5 hrs shift I do we cannot have a break due to work acuity and lack of staff. We have junior staff in tears with the pressure put upon them.
We aren't paid for our break and we are hard pushed to get it back as time owing. We cover empty shifts on the bank over and above our contracted hours as we know how hard it is for our colleagues in there.
We are all reaching breaking point some are there now and gone off sick. It is exhausting physically but more so mentally as you know before you even get to work what it's going to be like.

I have payslips going back 10 plus years and in that time my salary has barely changed and I am at the top of my band.

Our management team held an urgent meeting the other day to discuss the crisis going on within our trust with staffing and work acuity. Nothing was really dealt with just more management speak.

This government has to look after the NHS staff that have given so much and still are. Staff retention is in crisis and by offering this paltry pay rise they are doing nothing to stop this disaster becoming a momentous catastrophe resulting in even worsening patient safety levels being eroded even more.

How on earth can this government justify 30 plus billions for track n trace and HSS yet not offer a decent pay rise to NHS workers and in that I include care workers too.

Boris and co should hang their heads in shame but as per they think they are doing so well in offering us anything.

I'm sure I will have people coming on now to say they have lost jobs and taken paycuts and for that I am truly sorry but this cannot be used as an arguement for a huge group of essential workers being financially and emotionally abused by their employer which is exactly what this government are doing.

Clinical Excellence Awards, which most consultants could go for was anything from 3K to 77K in 2020, that is up to twice what the average nurse earns, that is in ADDITION to their normal income.

I don't begrudge consultants' pay. They do work hard to get there, they are under massive pressure and indeed, too many have left the profession, retired early because of conditions, but I am shocked that the wife of one of them could write with so much contempt about other healthcare getting what is drop of the ocean compared to what consultants can claim for as extra income.

someone who thinks his NHS pay is quite reasonable all things considered
How noble of him! I too would think I earn enough when I can aspire to get an extra 77K a year..... ok, that level is hard to achieve, but up to 20K isn't. That certainly is much more than 3% increase on any consultant salary.

You are either very ignorant of NHS pay structures, or you have a serious issue with entitlement. I have quite a few friends and family members who are consultants in hospitals and all think that 3% is a low increase for what auxiliary staff do.

Many have retired because their massive pensions have pushed them into supertax territory
Retention issues started years before this.

And what you call “such contempt” is actually just agreeing that 3% is about right, but that higher increments for the lower paid staff (many NHS being rather well paid) would be fairer
I think that anyone who benefits from much higher increase from the same pool of funds is in no way in a position to make such judgement.

@NotPersephone

Her bloke’s NHS royalty. A consultant with a quarter of a million annual income whose 3% will be more than just about anyone else’s but is just pocket money to him.

Yep, royalty. Grew up in a war zone, BAME, med school scholarship and recruited to work for the NHS in his first (equivalent) house officer job.

He’s practically Bullingdon Club, the over privileged twat. Oh and a narc who loves the sound of his own voice to boot. Otherwise known as “someone who thinks his NHS pay is quite reasonable all things considered”. Hyperbolic much?

Well now you're twisting my words to suit your hyperbolic post.

I said in my experience many consultants in mental health NHS trusts are hard work to work with and do sit in meetings loving the sound of their own voice. I have no experience of working in acute medical settings, so I can't comment on what it's like to work with medical consultants as opposed to psychiatrists. And I certainly didn't say your husband was a narcissist now did I.

Well now you're twisting my words to suit your hyperbolic post.

And mine. He is NHS royalty - and I notice there’s no disagreement about the quarter of a million annual income. I seem to remember four houses were mentioned at one point too. If I were benefiting from the NHS to such an extent I think I might have the decency not to criticise my bloke’s colleagues who are paid a fraction of his salary.

The problem is that so many NHS staff don’t seem to think they’re well-paid even when their terms are (relatively) generous

That’s because they’re not! Ffs look beyond your own privilege, your bloke’s right at the top of the tree. The ITU nurse doing 12 hour shifts with complete responsibility for critically ill patients for £25k isn’t on generous terms, relative or not.

A graduate level lawyer doesn’t have responsibility for other people’s lives; an ITU nurse does. They could literally kill their patient.

they also haven't had to face their own occupational mortality risks. They instead are able to to go work and contemplate the steps to double and even triple their income in the coming years. But yes, very comparable

There are lots of vacancies at the moment. We can't recruit salaried GPs and partners. We had to advertise 3? times for PNs and 4 times for HCAs. We'll lose several more GPs in the next year based on early retirement, emigration and career change.

Good luck with your studies, PPs, especially those who won't cry a river about current pay. See you in 5 to 10 years depending on your role and starting point?

The best thing for HCP's salaries and pensions (which are currently career average and contributory) and benefits would be to privatise and disaggregate the NHS as they are disadvantaged by the state's monopsony role. Not the best thing for the average patient nor the taxpayer, IMO.

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Anyway, do me exactly how trousering a 12% pay rise would make your hypothetical life-saving heroic ICU nurse less likely to kill a poorly patient than a 3% one?

You’re being utterly disingenuous now. You clearly don’t think expertise, skills or responsibility should be properly remunerated in the NHS unless you’re a consultant when apparently the sky’s the limit. Have you any idea how completely offensive and arrogant your attitude is?

@user1497787065

Oh to have a 3% pay increase, a fantastic pension scheme, generous annual leave allowance and very little or no chance of redundancy.

There are so many people whose lives have changed enormously having been furloughed or made redundant during the pandemic. Please
consider when complaining about the 'paltry and insulting pay rise' those who have struggled to pay their mortgage and feed their families.

Why do nursing staff always complain about having to pay to park whilst at work, that is normal for most?

As a frontline NHS worker (in mental health) this is how I feel too. It’s a bit rich tbh saying 3% isn’t enough when the NHS is already such a generous employer when it comes to salaries compared to many other places. Not many non NHS staff know that by the time you’re in a position to be getting no more pay rises you’ve already been climbing your banding for literally years. You can see the pay scales online.

I can’t get het up about this at all when it’s such a good deal compared to millions of other jobs, where else do you get decent pay rises almost every year just for staying in the same role?

It’s become a bit of a rallying cry that NHS staff are paid appallingly, the general public clearly haven’t bothered to look up the actual salaries, they’re publicly available. We are anything but poorly paid.

@NotPersephone

He is NHS royalty - and I notice there’s no disagreement about the quarter of a million annual income. I seem to remember four houses were mentioned at one point too.

Well of course there’s no sodding disagreement - I wrote it! You’re proving my point, though - i.e. higher paid staff don’t need more. The problem is that so many NHS staff don’t seem to think they’re well-paid even when their terms are (relatively) generous.

The problem is that so many NHS staff don’t seem to think they’re well-paid even when their terms are (relatively) generous.

Come to our trust/team. We’re a team of band 3-7 admin workers to clinicians and the general consensus is that we are well paid. It comes up in conversation a lot how wild it is to constantly see that NHS staff are paid poorly. I feel very well remunerated. I think a lot of nurses go straight from college to uni and into the workforce so they haven’t had other jobs to compare it to, haven’t had to live (properly live independently without a safety net) on what you get from other jobs. So if you’ve always been on that salary you get used to it, it feels low, and you get sucked into the whole ‘NHS pay is shit’ nonsense. I think perspective would help, and having a look at the national and local salary averages to see where an NHS salary fits in.

Well I suppose there may be a relation between retention and salary across the population of critical care staff which I think were already understaffed pre-COVID. For some potential career-changers, it might make a difference, for others not. For some, being thrown under a bus with respect to PPE and treatment will have made up their minds.

@Zilla1

There are lots of vacancies at the moment. We can't recruit salaried GPs and partners. We had to advertise 3? times for PNs and 4 times for HCAs. We'll lose several more GPs in the next year based on early retirement, emigration and career change.

Good luck with your studies, PPs, especially those who won't cry a river about current pay. See you in 5 to 10 years depending on your role and starting point?

The best thing for HCP's salaries and pensions (which are currently career average and contributory) and benefits would be to privatise and disaggregate the NHS as they are disadvantaged by the state's monopsony role. Not the best thing for the average patient nor the taxpayer, IMO.

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I don't understand the vacancies issue though. According to the nhs data there are fewer vacancies now than at any point in the last 3 years. There's 76,000. (5.9%) now vs 110,000 (9.4%) in 2018.

I know that's not the same as understaffing as staff numbers might have been cut but at face value the data for the nhs and teachers suggests that people have jumped into those jobs as the rest of the economy has struggled.

The data above is total numbers but looking at medical staff the vacancy numbers are currently half what they were in 2018.

We should pay people properly regardless but the recruitment and retention issue seems less bad that it used to be.

@Zilla1

Well I suppose there may be a relation between retention and salary across the population of critical care staff which I think were already understaffed pre-COVID. For some potential career-changers, it might make a difference, for others not. For some, being thrown under a bus with respect to PPE and treatment will have made up their minds.

It has definitely had an impact. The effect of throwing my stepdaughter under the bus is that she’s binned ITU to work in a 9 to 5 outpatient clinic for the same money. I think, once she’s been in the slow lane for a bit and recovered from last year, she may get bored and go back.

Your arrogance just keeps increasing, doesn’t it @NotPersephone? Insulting anyone who disagrees with you isn’t a great way to win an argument.

For PPs making points about tone deaf desires for pay rises and HCPs not reading the room, did a decade of reading the room and accepting a 12% pay cut in inflation adjusted terms over a decade work well for HCPs and some other public sector, well the HCPs that haven't left yet?

Some HCPs appear to have been thrown under a bus in the last 18 months (many non-HCPs also). Do PPs think the government will become more generous to HCPs in a few years when COVID is forgotten and belts are tightened for some to pay for furlough, TT and grants to businesses?

It seems clear this government has other priorities (£37bn TT, HS2, an industrial policy of picking 'winners'. PPs have reminded me HCPs will remain financially disadvantaged by a (mostly) government-controlled English NHS.

Not much #bekind on the left of any argument, sadly

On any side as far as I can see.