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.

It correlates with 1:6 GP vacancies being unfilled, because the current job is so relentlessly awful you literally can’t pay people enough to do it.

I’m a hospital doctor on much less than £119k (which incidentally is about double what most GPs earn so your GP is a massive outlier), and no amount of money would induce me to work in General Practice at the moment.

33% of patients in hospital are fit to leave BUT due to no social care... they are stuck there.

This is down to shockingly poor Govt policy on Adult sociual care funding to councils & failure to pay more fuel money as prices increased... so it's not war or Covid... has knock on affects on moral & increasingly large waiting lists.

This isn't anything to do with privatisation... just incompetence and lack of caring.

Sort this out & Hospitals would be able to function as such and not be glorified care homes.

@Tiredalwaystired indeed. Schroedinger's magic money tree. Only exists when someone important needs it. Like Schroedinger's tax base, inconceivable to tax the bases of wealth that has led to the accrual of more than £2.5tn of wealth to the richest 1% over the last 12 years. What on earth would people do if they didn't have a government to tell them where not to look and whom to hate?

My post is sarcasm and a jab at those who criticising nurses and proposed actions.. I'm married to a nurse of 45 years. Tomorrow she will start her shift at 7.30 am, her finish time is 7.30 pm. I probably won't see her until 10.00 pm because she is unable to get away.

See my reply above.

yes this is a ridiculous post. The nurses in my ward now regularly work 24 hour shifts when agency staff do not turn up. It's not safe and if there was a way to not use agency, they'd bloody well take it. There are not enough nurses in this country because of political decisions. This gives agency nurses a lot of power. You can't just stop employing them. Eventually some might choose to get substantive posts but what on earth do you do meanwhile?

The sooner joe public wakes up and realises this is EXACTLY what the tories want ie the demise of the nhs , the better. Covid ( and brexit) have expedited this process. The Tories are rubbing their hands in glee behind closed doors because AGAIN it will be the plebs at the bottom on the bottom rung who will pay, both metaphorically and in reality. They will shoehorn in privatisation, using companies owned by or heavily invested in by their tory supporting mates. Wake up !!!! Support the strike!!

I think the people saying that agencies should not be used just meant that people should work on the NHS staff bank rather than through agencies so that the agencies can't take a big cut.

Then they need to pay decent bank rates or overtime. would still be cheaper than an agency, but they won't. Its a political decision.

This is how ridiculous my trust was, they would rather pay the agency £70 an Hr than pay the nurses on the specialised unit OT pay of £25 to £30 an hour.
We would get agency nurses turning up with no experience at all in the area, so they were useless. God knows why they accepted the shifts (eg adult clinic nurses turning up to a children's oncology unit ). They wouldn't even have a children's qualification.

The issue now though is the current nurses are exhausted and burnt out. It's fine covering a ward for the odd shift for a bit of extra, but when it's never quiet and you are always short staffed then it gets to the point where the current nurses just can't continue to work 48 to 60 hours a week long-term. This isn't a blip in staffing levels.

I am completely behind you with the strike; nurses and junior doctors are all underpaid for the jobs they do and the NHS is shockingly wasteful. The situation you describe is clearly unsustainable. It is so frustrating that because people have been underpaid for several years, pay restoration looks greedy when in reality it is just about fairness.

I was shocked to discover that junior doctors are currently paid £14/hour and have to pay for their own exams and courses out of that as well as paying back student loans of £80k+, so they have less disposable income than a supermarket worker doing the same hours. Nurses are also paid barely any more than supermarket staff although their job is so much more skilled and more demanding. Who would choose to be an HCA earning £10.37/hour, clearing up all sorts of bodily fluids, when you can earn £10.57 at Aldi?!

I do think though that it would be better if NHS was unable to use external agencies and therefore had to pay through their bank at rates which attracted enough staff without agencies taking a cut.

Believe me, the wards will be the best staffed they've ever been when the nurses go on strike. Emergency and acute care nurses aren't allowed to strike and the others will be replaced by agency staff who will be all too happy to step in for extra pay. I'm fully behind our nurses, and I only hope this strike makes people understand how valuable they are.

Having said that, my GP published earnings of £119,000 last year and I don't know how that correlates with me not being able to get an appointment for at least 3 weeks!

What if I told you that no amount of money grows you an extra set of arms? What if I told you it doesn't make you able to function when severely deprived of sleep/mental relaxation. What if I told you it doesn't make constant hostility from every angle any more tolerable? It's almost as if GPs are saying that the current working conditions and risk of burnout or worse legislation are so bad they aren't worth the paycheque...

GP partner earnings can be quite odd. Are you looking at the earnings that relate to their employment after ten+ years study and considerable responsibility as well as potentially training/mentoring/supervising some other HCPs or layering in the income from having to personally invest in a business and have the responsibility of running the business? In the later case, I'm astonished the government seems to be rejoicing in that business having broadly no significant increase in income while having some hugely increased costs including energy and other inputs and salaries with some of those staff having, in effect, unfunded payrises that to be fair bear little relation to what those HCPs deserve or need given the eye watering price inflation the government incompetence has increased. FWIW for those PPs with a 'no sympathy as should have got a crystal ball out/earn more than me', we've had two neighbouring practices give back their contracts now and, in effect, close. Haven't seen that for most of my career. And of all my contemporaries at College, they earn more for shorter hours, without having to invest personally in their employers, without the ten+ years of study and without the equivalent personal liability. Yes, I am the most stupid.

GP earnings also have a weird definition of FT & PT
A Part time GP is up to 39 hrs a week, a FT is 59hrs
However the generally accepted term for FT employment in the U.K. is over 35hrs a week.

Doctors earnings are often, deliberately misleading. There has been pay erosion of 35 % for consultants. The higher end of the scale is the salary for a consultant who has worked for 20 years in the nhs. They do tons of hours above the full time hours in other jobs.
BMA should be asking for 35% pay rise or strike

@wonkylegs indeed. FWIW, no patient complaining to me about PT GPs during a consult has worked as many hours FT as that PT GP works every week. Same cohort of patients (known individuals for years rather than a generalisation) complain about never getting a F2F appointment, during a F2F appointment. Complaints about waiting weeks for appointments aired during a same day appointment. Thinking outsourced to the Daily Mail/Daily Telegraph/GB News/Health SoS is often not a pretty sight.

Managers will always go to go to bank first. Agencies are used when the bank office can't help so this plan is not going to work. Maybe if you stopped using agency then nurses would eventually join the bank instead but whilst you're playing that game of chicken, thousands would die.

not once have I heard a paramedic, police, fireman complain. It’s only ever nurses.

Paramedics and firefighters are balloting for strike action. Police aren't allowed to strike.

Whilst I agree that nurses should be paid fairly I am not sure how strikes will help as surely they won't be paid whilst on strike so they are in effect losing money. Given that it is debatable whether strikes work anyway in getting the desired pay rise it seems a bit of a waste of time. The NHS will presumably just ramp up more debt by paying agency nurses to cover on strike days.

@Cornishclio - options are limited really. Carrying on accepting poor salary (for the stress and demands of the job) for several years has not helped either.

They could continue to vote with their feet and leave the profession - there is a big vacancy rate. But this would be bad in the long term.

Tell me you don’t understand NHS Agenda for Change pay scales without telling me you don’t understand NHS Agenda for Change pay scales.

The pay rise of £1400 given to nurses this year was also given to HCAs, porters, ward clerks.

Paramedics are paid based on band the same as nurses. They start at band five, you guessed it, the same as nurses.

I don’t have time to explain all of the other inaccuracies in your post, but thought I’d highlight the main ones just to show how ridiculous it is that people who have absolutely no idea, seem to have such strong opinions.

I agree. There has been years of under investment and we need to be training more doctors and nurses and either pay more tax or the NHS becomes more efficient and reduces its reliance on expensive agency staff and we all have a serious conversation on what the NHS is for. Changes in social care also need to be made so that the massive numbers who are in hospital and really don't need to be like elderly who need care but not medical can be discharged.

Ultimately any nurse or doctor who doesn't like the terms of their employment can leave the profession as can anyone who is not happy..

I am betting that strike or no strike they won't get 17%.

you obviously don’t know any paramedics, police or firemen 🙄

@MarleneH here are some interesting FACTS for you.
Looking at the firefighters salary scale, they are trainees for 18 months, then competent after 36. These months are PAID TRAINING on the bands shown. Now look at the nurses, to get on this band 5 ENTRY pay scale, a nurse will have spent 3 UNPAID years at university racking up at least 30 grand in student loans they will immediately start paying back from that band 5 salary at a rate of 9% of their pay, so nearly £2700 a year straight back to the government the minute they get their pin, meanwhile the firefighter owes nothing and is already earning more than the nurse. Now sit down and ssssssh, you just look daft