Would you support a junior doctor strike?

[NC3435]

NC for this. To be clear, during the last strike, non training grade doctors were in hospitals etc as were consultants. Emergency work continued and A+E was functioning. The background to the dispute is that JDs want pay restoration to the levels in 2008/09 and the BMA has been attempting to engage with the government for a while without any acknowledgement. There is a staffing and retention crisis with more and more doctors leaving the country every year. Those of us still around are pretty burnt out from the last 2 years and things are getting worse - this includes patient care.

It's nice to see the support we have from many members of the public! I was 23 when I started my FY1 job and I was routinely managing wards alone on weekends and after 5 pm (we all worked shifts during unsociable hours). There are very few professions were people so young are dealing with seriously ill people and many of us would just internalise the trauma and death. A decade later I worked on the COVID wards and routinely sat with people who were dying because their families couldn't make it in time. You never forget. And it wasn't just doctors - there were nurses, HCAs, physios etc who stayed with patients way past their shifts just to make sure that they didnt make that final journey alone. There will be people who say they are not afraid of death but trust me, when it comes to those final moments before you make that crossing, you will not want to be alone. The healtcare system was broken way before COVID, but now it has managed to break most of us.

Like I said, tone deaf.
at least my local doctors were only tone deaf to displaying their message to a roomful of people for whom retiring early is an absurd fantasy.
they didn’t progress to complaining about having a million pounds in their pension fund ……

the strike failed because those controlling the messaging were in a bubble and entirely uninterested in those outside it.

ApiratesaysYarrr · 25/11/2022 23:48
Lingles · 25/11/2022 21:36
“I also think the last strike was tone deaf.

I remember sitting in a waiting room watching a video about doctors having to retire early in their 50s. That’s the definition of tone deaf.”

“The issue with doctors having to retire early is because of changes in tax and pensions that mean that the most senior doctors (and even some who haven't been consultants that long) are faced with a situation where their tax bill is so high that they are effectively paying to work, not being paid to work.”

Yes, absolutely. If we want a functioning healthcare system then we need functioning doctors (and nurses) that want to do their jobs. Striking is the only way for that to happen as the current government is a load of shite.

Absolutely.

We've done that. It doesn't work.

An FY1 / FY2 will be earning somewhere around £6.50 an hour for their hours worked.

Earning somewhere around £30k a year.

Paying out around £5k a year in additional training costs and insurance.

Working around 70 hours a week.

And as a GP with 10 years experience, I discovered that after paying a nanny (only form of childcare which worked due to the hours) I was taking home less than minimum wage......

It’s only ‘tone deaf’ for people who have private healthcare and feel so darn healthy they won’t need the NHS.

yes doctors can’t afford to pay 7 months of their take home pay for the year back to the government due to the arbitrary way pensions are calculated, whereby there is a HMRC bill now for an artificially calculated pension rise, that is not an actual rise they will ever collect

its a good way to get consultants to leave the nhs though. I’d presume that’s the government plan.

I would fully support them, they are paid a pittance!!

I’m getting very tired of being expected to support people who are paid considerably more than I am going on strike for more pay.

But that’s the problem. There isn’t enough doctors, nurses and teachers in England due to pay and conditions.

I support all workers who want to have reasonable terms and conditions and not have real terms pay cuts, so that would include doctors.

There's been too much trying to whip up anger towards people going on strike but it affects us all.

There's always money for contracts for mates, there's always money to pay the top 1%, there's always the ability for people at the top to raid pension funds with no consequences. It's about time workers in general started to have each others backs a little and refuse to scrap with each other over crumbs

Would you be happy if enough doctors left the NHS due to pay and working conditions that it collapsed, and you had to pay for private healthcare?

Doctors earn more than me but I don't begrudge them striking. If we want to attract the best doctors and nurses so we can have excellent healthcare, then they need decent pay and good working conditions. I don't want the doctors looking after me to be overworked, stressed, tired, burnt out and worried about paying their bills, I want them to be functioning properly.

Again, passport, I don't know who is feeding this stuff to you, but you are tone deaf.
What do you think people who are paid the minimum wage earn after paying their nanny?

"And as a GP with 10 years experience, I discovered that after paying a nanny (only form of childcare which worked due to the hours) I was taking home less than minimum wage......"

Utter shit.

We need to attract the highest calibre of Doctors to work in the NHS. One of the ways to achieve this is to pay a salary and have working conditions which attract people to the role.

If I wanted a minimum wage job I'd get one. I wouldn't have studied for 6 years, given up most of my 20s to crappy shifts including some where I worked from Friday 9am to Monday 5pm with generally no more than an hour or two's sleep each night. I wouldn't take huge responsibility, with the risk of being sued or struck off or ending up on the front of the Daily Mail for something that isn't my fault. I wouldn't be shouted at for the failings of other parts of the system.

Work and qualifications should lead to financial reward, over and above that related to the vocation of doing the job. Otherwise, why do any of us bother?

"Work and qualifications should lead to financial reward, over and above that related to the vocation of doing the job. Otherwise, why do any of us bother?"

I agree Passport! But the idiots who claim to represent you think the rest of us are absolutely stupid and don't "get" the difference between a job with your pension scheme and a job with ours.
Absolutely nothing wrong at all with GPs saying they want all their time valued and paid for. That's honest. Your union seems determined to send ludricrous mixed messages - looked at the nonesencal conflation of "oh dear I've got a million in my pension fund" with "i'm a junior doctor earning bugger all for saving lives" even on this very thread.

You may think I'm against you. I'm not. I'm trying to save you from the idiots who produced the "we're all in this together" script and dared to show a roomful of people with no retirement security whatsoever (and that's most of us) a film about how hard it is to retire at 50. Those people are arrogant twats and you need to tell them we aren't stupid.

To put it another way passport, every time you let these fools convince you it's a good idea to claim in public that "after paying your nanny your are paid less than the minimum wage" you lose a little bit more public support.

I think the problem is the confusion between vocation and money and the mixed messages fed to you.
I also think that a doctor's day-job is to have more knowledge than the customer and consequently when they start talking about other people's jobs ~(whether they could do them, whether they pay more~) they tend to be very poorly trained to do so and come across really really badly.

I would absolutely support the strike. I remember a thread on here by a junior doctor getting derailed because we couldn't believe the law pay. The poster was part time but others couldn't believe their low wages. The doctor was basically accused of lying about their pay but they said the advertised salaries were for a 48 hour week (is that true?).

Here are the salary scales. On the minimum wage of 9.50 at 48 hours the income would be 23k ish and it's 25k ish. It is shocking.

Yes. Conditions are absolute garbage, that's true in plenty if jobs but the level of responsibility they have is huge.

I don't think scales attached.

I'm not sure if I would to be honest- My newly qualified friend who has just started work as a locum dr is earning £160 an hr. I'm sure jr dr can push through?

after about a month of asking on here and being fed propaganda I finally worked out that the previous strike concerned Saturdays being "rebranded" as weekdays (so no longer paying more). which was a legitimate grievance that could have been articulated clearly.
it was like pulling teeth to find that out though. i couldn't understand why. other than that those organising them genuinely think they are cleverer than the rest of us on topics completely outside their expertise.

Where ? Doing what? Antisocial locum OOH GP overnight serving massive area with huge workload and responsibilities isn't earning close to that. I've been qualified almost 30 years and have never earned that! Ask him to PM me please....

@Lingles obviously I haven’t seen that video, but there are some weirdnesses to the NHS pension scheme that can land you with massive bills when you are on a “normal” salary with a pension pot way under £1m - it is your “predicted” final pension pot based on the previous year’s growth, which doesn’t necessarily bear any resemblance to your actual expected final pension pot.

I got a six-figure tax bill when I moved from the registrar payscale (50% of which, the on-call component, isn’t pensionable), to the consultant payscale (which is pensionable at FTE salary, even if you are PT). This was based on my potential future pension pot if it continued to grow at an exponential rate, which obviously it wasn’t going to, it was a one-off due to moving onto a different payscale.

I was PT and earning well under £50k, with a final salary pension pot which went from £120k as an SpR to about £180k as a year 1 consultant (which is fine but nothing like £1m, and I had been in the NHS for over 15 years by that point). I won’t get anywhere close to a £1m pension pot by retirement age.

I assumed there must be a mistake and sought independent financial advice, but apparently it was correct. Thank god it was the middle of the pandemic and there was a government agreement to insure it for that tax year, or we would literally have lost our home.

You must surely see that kind of thing is grossly unfair? Also disproportionately affects women working less than full time as their “predicted pot” is more likely to fluctuate wildly.

None of which has any bearing on the junior doctors’ strike (doesn’t really affect junior doctors until they become consultants), but does explain why doctors kick up a fuss about it.