To consider leaving the NHS?

27 replies

Fedupnurse2022 · 20/04/2022 14:46

I’m just so fed up of unpaid overtime, staffing shortages, broken facilities and equipment and terrible pay. With the NI increase, my pay is actually going DOWN £25/month, and I won’t make an increment for another year…even then I reckon it’ll only be about 50 quid a month. With inflation rising and costs of everything else going up, I don’t know how to manage anymore. We are lucky to have two incomes (not high earners, but two incomes nonetheless) but have two young DCs too.

I love my work and am good at patient care but with staffing it often feels unsafe and I worry I’m putting my PIN on the line.

OP posts:

Jonny1265 · 21/04/2022 09:03

Fedupnurse2022 · 20/04/2022 22:12

@Jonny1265 , mind my asking where you went after leaving?

thank you to everyone for the replies. I’m just feeling so down and demoralised. I’ve already left the wards and changed to outpatients, I thought I’d have a better balance without unsocial hours, but we’re so short staffed and rammed with patients I’m regularly there 30, 45 minutes over and not had a proper break all day. We are promised time owing but it never comes through. And with costs of everything gone up it just feels like a slap in the face.

I wish it were as easy as walking out at the end of a shift instead of staying late but there would be ramifications for that of course.

I moved into education😂. Teaching is hard but no harder than nursing and with much better holidays. My kids were young when I made the move and it suited from a family perspective too. I've now got an senior leader role and my salary is back on a par with my previous NHS one. I was lucky to be able to take the financial hit for a few years but it's been well worth it.

SaggyBlinders · 21/04/2022 11:09

NannyOggsWhiskyStash · 21/04/2022 07:17

Reading this is quite depressing, a lot of the training for the NHS was subsidised, so jumping ship from one of the best things the UK has ever created will just hasten it's end. I get that the Tories have chronically underfunded it for years, but try and get shifts or a job in the NHS that will work for you

If the OP is not yet at the top of band 5, as she has suggested as she said she won't get an increment for another year, then she trained as a nurse after the fees and bursary were no longer funded by the NHS. I was in the last cohort to get fees paid (thank God!). The OP will have paid 9 grand a year.

The interest rate on student loans for students who started uni after 2012 is now 9 - 12%. If inflation stays the same then a student nurse training in 2020 and remaining at Band 5 will owe £796,694 by 2050.
nursingnotes.co.uk/news/education/student-loan-interest-rate-skyrockets-to-12-in-england/

She doesn't owe the NHS years of her life.

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