To be disgusted that nurses may be striking for a 17% pay rise!

[justonemire]

Of course nurses should receive a fair salary and of course they have as much right as anyone else to ask for a pay rise. However to ask for a pay rise that is 5% above the current 12% inflation rate is just ridiculous and never going to be approved.

The average nurses salary is £35.600 and this would equate to a pay rise of £6.150.

Yes nurses do a great job but so do a lot of other key workers in the public sector who have only received 2%

The government simply cannot accept the nurses pay demands because if they do everyone else would go on strike for a similar deal. Where would it end.

Therefore the outcome is that people will not receive the proper level of care we are all paying taxes for. If there are strikes then The NHS will be run as if it is Christmas Day. God help us and our loved ones then.

There will be resulting misdiagnosis and deaths and where will the fault lie? Yes you can blame the government, Putin for invading Ukraine and pushing up food and energy costs, etc but I think we will also all blame the nursing profession too for asking for a completely unrealistic 17% pay rise.

I admire the Nursing unions for getting on with this very necessary step.
I am doctor and wish the BMA would get on with it- they will start with juniors but we’ve all had the pay erosion- consultants have had equivalent of 35% pay drop over the last 12 years

ideslly there would be a joint nurse and doctor strike- I think that would be most effective

It took me 25 years, a degree and extra qualifications to earn £35k as a nurse. Most are on Band 5 and the top of that scale is £27k .

I no longer woek as a nurse because burnout is real. I now work in a non clinical role where I have the time to really talk with patients and give them social support.

Most nurses I know will not abandon patients in hospital it would take a very hard heart to walk away from a patient in immediate need of care.

I back them all the way.

100% behind nurses striking. I was a qualified nurse and left in the aftermath of COVID. In a completely different sector now which I am brand new to, as I worked in health and social care from 17. I work from home fully. My basic pay now is higher than when I first qualified as a nurse, and there is a performance bonus. A 17% increase for them would bring their pay in line with my basic.

This is so, so wrong. I need no degree at all for this job and am treated very well. It is only since having this role I have realised how astonishingly poorly nurses are treated in terms of pay, working conditions and employee care.

Not a nurse but started training in 2008 when the pay was still decent as agents for change had just come in.

The government has been cutting NHS pay year on year for over a decade. Aspiring nurses would have looked at the salary when they were thinking of entering the profession. This appears to be an argument for a massive wage hike and not for nurses just shutting up and putting up.

As others have said, when I started training (in 2009) pay was ok and the system (while stretched) was not under anywhere near the same pressure.

If there had known then what I know now I wouldn't have become a nurse - I'm also studying to retrain and move to a completely different sector. What would happen if we all did that?

@howmanybicycles, but sadly all public sector pay has been cut in same way, not just nurses, teachers pay been cut in real terms too, civil servants got 1 percent pay rise one year after two years of pay freeze. Nurses are not unique or alone. Last year no one got much pay rise but nurses did get more than other public sector workers.

@caringcarer you are not listening. Teachers start on a similar wage to nurses but progress to a higher wage quite quickly. They have a similar level of training. I'm not going to get into a debate about who works harder.

I've long thought that staff nurses should be band 6 and SCNs 8a (lead nurses 8b). This would IMO bring them in line with other AHPs, but it would be very expensive. Maybe that's the compromise this time to avoid paying all other AfC staff a huge rise (and I am other AfC staff).

it doesn’t matter either way if non-union or another union because even those that belong to the striking union are in breach of contract - that’s the point of the strike. Your employer could take action but if the strike is legal it’s unlikely that they would.

My point was that the argument of 'you knew what the pay was like when you started training' is highly flawed because nurses were paid more when they started training. The fact that all public sector have had their pay cut does not change that.

It wouldn't surprise me.

Some areas - eg Speech Therapy, and almost everything connected to mental health - are real Cinderellas as far as the Govt is concerned.

Doesn't change it, or make it right.

The only people earning more in real terms seem to be politicians, bankers and top management in big corporations.

17% is unrealistic and won't happen, but they should get a reasonable pay rise. Shame that it's patients that will suffer though.

Thats down to the Government who have forced this onto Nurses & AHP's.
But of course patients are suffering right now.

17% would just take to where they were a decade or so ago, its not unrealistic - better staff retention means money saved on bank and foreign staff which are v expensive.

However, this Govt wont back down, so unless the nurses go for an all out strike, they wont get a penny more than the pay body recommends.

T@Zebedee55 barristers got 15% so it's not out of the realms of possibility. It's just a negotiation technique

Christ, thats depressing

Where's the money?

In the pockets of the already very very very wealthy.

And yet some on this thread are seemingly happy with shite wages while that is happening?

Do other grad roles compare with nursing?

Is your son likely to stay on 23k for the whole of his career?

Is he likely to deal with the things nurses do every day?

Just like everything else in life?

Do you think massive corporations aren't doing the same?

There is massive profiteering going on, using energy, war and CV as excuses to increase profits.

Remember Tesco saw profits double from £1.1bn to £2.2bn last year - this despite a claimed "focus" on keeping prices in check to help out the poor struggling consumer!

Or the margins on fuel per litre, many times what they were pre CV.

Couldn't make it up.

lets not forget the Tories cheering when the payrise for nurses was voted down (2017)

Does that relate to my point

Yes. I'm sure that billionaires are now trillionaires since the pandemic

Well the UK did see its number of billionaires increase last year, to 177 with a total wealth of £653bn - thats up £53bn from last year.

I'd stick a 10% wealth tax on them and sort out social care and nhs staffing/pay.

No one, needs to be a billionaire, its totally wrong.

@walkinginsunshinekat that's just silly talk. Lots of people are trying hard to condition every one to think the solution is raising existing taxes and averting pay rises so have a pay cut rather than taking anything from those who have accrued an additional more than £2.5tn in the last 12 years. You are making a mockery of their hard work. If you carry on, someone will have to go to the effort of saying the rich will leave and then where will the UK be without the truly hard working entrepreneurs who unlike nurses need the motivation of money to get out of bed? Or mention some variant of the Laffer curve and say the tax take will go down. Save those hard working SPADs the effort of posting and reminding everyone of that and encourage everyone to kneel down and take it.