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.

Tories have been saying “there’s no money” for 12 years. And yet £37billion was found for the disaster that was Tesco and trace.

Not to mention the money that was found to buy off the DUP a few years ago.

It’s always a political choice where the money goes. Always.

Lol at Tesco and trace. Thanks autocorrect.

I'm loving the autocorrect there - Tesco & Trace! 😆

FFS, no one foresaw laying down their life as a nurse but that's what happened to 3 of my colleagues on our covid unit.
We could have walked away then (part of my wishes I had) but we didn't, despite the lack of adequate PPE.

I'm very glad that we seem to be coming out of the cowed state we've been in for 40+ years because the Thatcherite dogma that withdrawal of labour was some kind of wicked aberration was embraced. I'm with the nurses and in fact any group who decides to assert their rights in the face of the mess that has been created in our country.

No the majority of nurses are band 5 so 27k to 32k The figure you quote is an average so will include the pay of chief nursing officers, matrons, advanced nurse practitioners etc. who are on larger amounts, but there is a lot less of them. this pulls the average up.
Most ward nurses are either band 5 or at best band 6 (ward manager/senior sister) to get any higher you have to specialise which requires usually years of experience in that field, a master's degree, and an advanced nurse practitioner course. So not your average nurse.

And mine too.

Well there is but apparently spending £44.6bn (so far), to be able to get to Birmingham from London on a train 30mins earlier than they can now is far more important.

Don’t believe the crap you’re reading in the headlines.
nursing working conditions are appalling. The average nurses pay is not £35k although I wish it was!!
tell me another job where you’re responsible for up to thirty sick sometimes life threateningly so individuals? I can’t even be bothered to type how it feels I’ve had this conversation so many times.

My support is 100% with the nurses. What a shit country we live in when those who care for our most vulnerable and sick cannot afford a decent standard of living. I hope they get their 17%.

@ThingsIhavelearnt I am a Band 5 nurse (NHS) working full time and I do not earn £35k a year. Perhaps get your facts right.

Perhaps she did. The RCN recommendation is indeed RPI + 5% which would be ~ 17% (www.rcn.org.uk/Professional-Development/publications/rcn-submission-nhs-pay-review-body-2022-23-pay-round ). Nurses.co.uk does estimate average pay at ~ £35k. ( www.nurses.co.uk/blog/a-quick-overview-of-nurses--salaries-in-the-uk-in-2022/ ). There doesn't seem to be a breakdown by role, but the payroll cost of NHS staff in 2020 was £56 billion. If say 2/3rds of that is Nursing staff then a 17% increase would be in the region of £6-7bn. That's about half of the extra funding that the NHS levy was going to raise.

If we are serious about this, as the majority sentiment seems to be, then we need more than just solidarity with the Nurses we need serious and implementable plans to raise the money to pay for what we want. That means higher taxes not only on the wealthy but on all of us.

17%!?? Disgraceful.

Should be 25% 😉

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

Don't know the full details of the salaries there (I'm a nurse in Ireland), I just skimmed the few pages of the thread and I see a lot of posters saying NHS nurses actually make an even lower average salary than this.

A rise to £42,750 on average across pay bands sounds more fitting to me and I certainly hope they get it.

Very happy to support the nurses.

Nurses could strike for 117% pay rise as far as I'm concerned, and I'd still back them. Was there ever a profession so badly treated and poorly paid? We were all banging pots and pans for them 2 years ago.
Solidarity, nurses!

Not only are you unreasonable but you are also ridiculous

nurseibernard - so what would a newly qualified nurse expect to earn? I'm finding all the stats bandied around confusing as they seem to conflict

Yes, sick and tired of this.
Incompetents in charge, making us pay AND blaming us for every calamity they manage to create.
Couldn't even make sure they had PPE ready to go when covid had been raging in China and Italy for months. Can't understand why there aren't more prosecutions tbh.

Sounds good. They're all unionised too so hopefully they'll be fighting for their members to get rises too.

No sign of the OP then?

Funny how there is always enough money available to throw into bottomless, pointless cash pits (HS2, T&T, spending far more on repeated and inhumane PIP assessments than would actually be saved by catching 'fraud', rather than going by expert medical opinion whether someone was disabled or not).

But not for those who are actually helping society function, or would be, if they weren't being driven into the ground with horrific working conditions and low pay (nurses, gp's, teachers, carers etc).

Fuck that. Go nurses!

Again though, it's a percentage above the RPI. People need to be able to live and have been getting miserly and below inflation pay rises for years. Why should people keep meekly accepting it?

Hahaha not brave enough to enable the vote function, or to return to the thread!

Before you quote the average nurse's salary, check where the figure comes from. Some government spokespeople were called out earlier this year for stating averages (I think it was RMT members vs nurses at the time) in a way that implied that was what the average person would earn. In actual fact, they were including all the high earning managers to push the average up. Almost half of nurses are on Band 5, where the upper wage limit is capped below the quoted 'average' salary.