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.

Is this an actual genuine post? Is this your account of events and opinion of nurses@DonnaB5859

Donna is alive and did not die after her 27 days in ICU. Let's assume it's satire

Don’t be ridiculous, they’ve been undervalued and underpaid for years, are leaving in droves and we have a massive shortage. They hardly ever strike but they have no choice because this government continues to screw them over.

Just about sums it up, really.🙄Heaven forbid you should ever feel the need to explain yourself...

So, you're saying you didn't receive intensive care, @DonnaB5859 ?
Are you aware of the pressure the service has been deliberately placed under by govt ideologues with personal money tied up in private health companies?
That the staff in the main do their best, while colleagues were dying during the pandemic? Yes, they're human, not angels. We've all got bad stories, I expect. But that does not undermine their need for a decent wage. Why should they be underpaid cos you didn't like the way you survived ICU?

Nurses don't earn over £30k. Neither do most teachers who are only on about 27K despite having Masters degrees or PhDs. They're planning to strike to earn a decent living wage too.

If we paid nurses better and had more in post (trained more and employed more from abroad), we wouldn't need to pay so much for agency staff.
Training more nurses isn't easy though. We need more staff so we have staff available to facilitate the placements. It takes time away from clinical tasks to train students (as it should, it's no use dumped students in a team and expecting them to learn by osmosis).

@lapun just curious as to how much your final salary pension is costing the tax payer?

Tessabelle74

Not a lot as I joined when I was in London and only worked for the Council from 1885 to 2001. I was then 66 and although I wanted to keep working the Union was opposed as it might set a precedent. My current work pension is £465 per month. I have friends who worked much longer than I did and their pensions are annually as much as some low paid people who are working at the current time. There is no doubt that local government jobs pay well. Civil servants pay is not high at ordinary levels of responsibility but pensions seem to make up for that. I was a well qualified worker as I studied up until my 50s part time and I had an MSc. Econ from LSE. I also worked in research for BBC but found competition for advancement tough as I was relatively old. I tell you this because I am not some stupid old lady as my Pidgin English nom de plume means old!. The people I feel sorry for are those work at care of elderly people in the community and in elderly care homes whose pay is appalling. Paramedics are also poorly paid. Not all nurses are Angels and my observations as a patient have made me sympathetic towards Nurses Aides who do a lot of the dirty work.

I was not working in 1885! I am not that old….sorry I worked in local govt from 1985!

I am not a nurse but work in the nhs in pathology labs. I completely support the nurses. Our real term pay has decreases significantly over the past 20 years. I now work 12.5 hournight shifts regularly shifts alone running the entire lab with no break as its so busy. I'm lucky if i get to deglove etc for 20 mins during that time to go to the loo and get a drink... Whilst keeping the phone with me. Its ridiculous! Yet of course senior management and patients expect fast accurate results of their urgent ward and a&e blood tests!!! We can not afford to lose more staff. The Tories want to run down the nhs so they can follow Americas abysmal healthcare format and privatise everything. It's not good for the country at all please support the nurses. You have no idea unless you work like I do in these difficult conditions. These shifts and this workload are not sustainable.

Disgusted is a very strong word to use and yes YABU. I ve been a nurse for 47 years and I ve never earned anything like £35k a year, how lovely would that be, so no nothing like an average salary. I was lucky I trained at a time when we learned on the job, on the wards and got paid for doing so even though it was underpaid then. I personally could not afford now to train to go into nursing so how can we attract people into the profession? The NHS is so short staffed at the moment that nurses are reaching burn-out. They want to be able to spend time with each and every patient and give them quality care but there are just not enough of them to be able to and this is a result of years of austerity, underfunding and sadly Brexit when many of our colleagues were made to feel so unwelcome in the uk they left the NHS and went back home. The strikes are not just about pay, they are about conditions also and trying to improve the service to make it safer for both staff and patients. I personally retired at the end of 2018 , but kept my registration and returned to work when Covid hit and have been working for the last 2 and a half years doing vaccinations, basically because there’s no one else to do them, most of us working are retired nurses and drs who have given up their time to help out .
In my 47 years as a nurse, I ve worked at night, bank holidays, birthdays, extra hours ( unpaid) weekends, Christmas and New Year, I ve been so busy I’ve not had time to get a drink or go to the loo, I’ve held hands as people died, comforted grieving families, washed and fed those who are unable to feed themselves, delivered over 200 babies( personally) been attacked on a number of occasions whilst on duty and I have never been on strike but nor have I ever had a decent wage for doing all those things. I m nearly 66 and frankly I m exhausted and I can’t do this any more.
Over the years I have seen the NHS failing, colleagues demoralised, stressed, unable to fully do the job they love and become Ill themselves because of the job, so I now support my colleagues in their strike action, but make no mistake even though there will be a strike, the general public will still be looked after because there will be those of us who will be at work still caring for you while others make a very important stand. Bang pots and pans all you like but I would say walk for a day in our shoes and see if you are still disgusted. Sorry for the rant, but posts like this make me so sad, thank you to everyone who has left supportive comments xx

Looks like you’re on your own with one other Thatcherite OP. Not that you’ve had the balls to come back.

I thought you said nurses were going out on strike not doctors.. it's doctors who diagnose what's wrong with you not a nurse. At least they do hers in Wales.
Nurses work so hard. Often through their breaks stay on And do unpaid over time due to shortages so why shouldn't they expect a decent days pay for the Exellent work they do.
I worked in a hostel for nearly 6 years as a domestic and worked every Christmas day bar one. Just because its Christmas day it doesn't mean patients are not cared for.
It's about time these kind and caring men and women (who also pay taxes and national insurance) got the pay rise that they more than deserve. No Nurse( or anybody else for that matter) who are is in full time work should worry about how they are going to pay the bills and buy food and get to work

For to many years they have been shafted by governments and its disgusting and about time it ended .
If they do go on strike I'll be supporting them 100% like I did the postmdn and women when they were out...
Anybody who has ever been in hospital as a patient should stand by the nurses who helped look after them and got through their illness.

Nurses are often described as angels its about time we treated them like angels and respected the work they do.
And just psy them a fair wage.
Why not cut out the ex prime ministers pay deal and cut mps wages that way they could afford to pay the nurses what they are asking for.
Some nurses are struggling to pay for 1 home never mind 2..
If mps truly cared about this country and nurses drs teachers etc they'd be cutting back on what they claim is necessary for them. Ie 2 houses expenses paid and huge pay outs to ex prime ministers for one needs to stop.

Thank you nurses for your dedicated work care and kindness you show on a daily basis to anyone who needs it..

I think had the Govt shown a bit of leadership after CV and given a decent pay rise, instead of the kicking and screaming one they were forced into last year, there now wouldn't be strike action, their initial 1% offer pissed off a lot of staff.

Interesting Gillian Keagan saying today "there is no point" (to strike action)

The Govt will tough this out, they don't use the NHS (when they do, they queue jump) and quite frankly, do not care whether it sinks or swims.

My nurse DP regularly works extra hours at little, or often no, notice. She has to do night shifts, be on call some weekends and, this year, is working both Christmas Eve night and the night shift on Christmas Day (which means she’ll sleep through most of the day itself).

All, after over 30 years on the job, for the princely salary of 33K. A salary which has, in real terms, dropped every year for the last 10-12 years as pay ‘increases’ have not matched inflation.

She, and her colleagues, are often left very short-staffed. She’s often been left as the only person with experience of particular procedures, ‘supervising’ agency staff who can do little more than fetch things because they don’t usually work in her speciality.

If we could afford for her to do it, she’d have dropped her hours significantly by now and/or left nursing for something (almost anything) else. She is fatigued, suffers physically from the work and wouldn’t recommend nursing to anyone these days.

If they don't care, that's one thing. But it will just accelerate the decline of the NHS. It cannot be that the staff must defend it. It's a hardline approach by Tories that they think the NHS is nearly communist, but you wonder if that view is shared by voters.

I don't think so, to judge by this thread. I'm sure that if voters were told that they would have to pay additional insurance for medical services there would be outage: but that is the Conservatives view and has been for at least a decade.

If they don't pay up, then you know that they intend to run it into the ground.

I'm not sure there is much point in continuing this thread as the OP has not returned, although I strongly suspect she has posted on here under a different name.

You are not being unreasonable. The entry level salary for a nurse starts at £30,225. They have the option to stay in the job, or leave if they don’t like the pay or conditions, like the rest of us mere mortals.

"They have the option to stay in the job, or leave if they don’t like the pay or conditions, like the rest of us mere mortals."

Many do seem to be leaving, but that's a terrible thing for the rest of us as we have a shortage. We shouldn't be wanting them to leave!

I have many friends who are nurses, that are disgusted by the threat of strike action. Their opinion is nursing is a vocation and if people see it as a “job” then they shouldn’t be nurses in the first place.

@CocoFifi You appear to have missed the irony in your comment given the significant shortages across the NHS. So you suggest staff leave due to the poor working conditions - that's why we have so many shortages! So you're happy for the collapse of the NHS to continue?! Then what?!

I assume these 'friends' are not struggling to feed their families and are happy, healthy and not stressed then?!

Good for them my Mum is a retired Sister district Nurse she had a degree.
My husband and my Dad earned more money than my mum ever did.
It's disgusting Nurses don't get paid what they are deserved.
I've heard enough horror stories over the years at the abuse they get from patients and patients family as well as Drs and management.
Everyone moans the NHS is crumbling can you blame anyone for not wanting to do nursing anymore crap salaries followed by crap treatment and working conditions.

The NHS is not fit for purpose. We need to look at the likes of France and Germany to see how it is done properly. The nurses are doing theirselves no favours. I am not very compassionate about nurses and what they do. Last times I was in a hospital the nurses were more interested in talking about their weekend and getting drunk, rather than looking after my father in law. It took an hour and several requests for them to change his bed, as they had ignored his previous request for a bed pan