To tell you that a newly qualified doctor only earns £29k?

[Drstrike]

Doctors now leave medical school after 5/6 gruelling years of study - with £85k of student debt.

First year post-qualification is £29k, rising to £33k the following year. Then things stagnate around £40k whilst in specialty training.

The first year post-qualification is more supervised. But you are still the first doctor to be bleeped if one of your ward patients starts bleeding post-op, falls and hits their head, has chest pain etc. and you are the one to initiate management then contact your consultant to let them know. You are still covering wards overnight with seniors at a distance. You are still prescribing medications, ordering scans involving radiation, explaining plans to patients and families. You are still a fully qualified doctor - just not with full registration.

This salary is based on a 40-48 hour full time week depending on rota. That means you can be "part time" working 40hrs a week in a job like surgery.

It takes 5/6 years of medical school, 2 years of foundation training, 3 years of core training and 3 years of higher specialty training to become a consultant. That's a commitment of 13 years, generally from the age of 18.

During this time doctors have to pay for their own progression exams (£500-£1000 each).

There are out of hours premia for nights/weekends on top, but in specialties like psychiatry and GP only basic is earnt.

Does this shock you?

I do think paramedics could do with a payrise though for sure

My solicitor, fabulous person, provides excellent advice.
My accountant, fabulous perso , provides excellent advice.
My dentist, optician, physio, podiatrist all the same.
My hairdresser, fabulous person, runs a small business, provides a fabulous service. Ditto: my mechanic, electrician, plumber, builder, cleaner, gardener, odd-job man.

If there's ever a cock-up all of the above apologise, put it right and unequivocally treat me as an equality stakeholder.

My GP and local hospital Dr's tend to be reductive, opaque, not helpful and waste my time. When I dealt with an F2 in A&E (August rotation) she was patronising assuming I was retired as I was over 60, addressed me as though I had fewer brain cells than an amoeba and discounted my concerns that my back was broken telling me I had to trust her because she had been to medical school. She categorically told me there were no new breaks in my back despite being told only the L1 had been broken previously. I believe that's because she argued do hard about my concerns she didn't want to face up to the fact she was wrong. It caused a five month delay in cranking up my treatment for severe osteoporosis. If there are too many like her, no I don't think the pay is too low and I also think the training needs to emphasise how to deal better with fellow humans.

The difference between NHS staff and others with whom I deal - the others have to provide high standards of service because I pay them directly.

The starting salary may be £29k it increases very well by age 32/not incomparable for example with a barrister although they may earn significantly more than the average consultant. However they get no paid holiday, sick pay, or pension contributions.

@Drstrike I think you need to reflect a little on your inexperience and narrow mindedness.

If you want your best and brightest to go into a profession (which I think we’d all argue we do when it comes to healthcare providers), then you have to offer wages that compete with other industries. You can’t rely on people’s altruism to prop up an entire sector where there are many other jobs that bright and talented young people can go into, with much higher wages and a better work life balance. Doctors in the UK are woefully under compensated compared to counties.

All these public sector people want payrises. And it's the private sector people that will have to pay for it all. Most of whom won't get anything like the kind of payrise doctors are asking for. So our standard of living will decrease to pay for it all. This is not right.

If Junior Doctors received the pay they do, and had a sensible work-life balance, they would be able to take the long term view that over the course of their career, their earning potential will be really good. It’s the working conditions that are the issue and cause people to leave.

You can’t strike about the underfunding if a service which has caused the job to be untenable. You have to strike about pay.

Sadly, people who feel they can’t and won’t support teachers and doctors and nurses will find those services worsen and fade away. There will be an increasingly 2-tier system where those who can pay for health and education do.

If we want these services here in the future, pay in the early years and conditions which are directly connected to funding if the service need improvement. If we don’t support that, but instead get side-tracked into what people can earn later in their career or that others earn less, the services will collapse.

How does more money help off two doctors want to get married but can't take time off? That money isn't the problem.

Also who gets £50k salaries out of university? That's ten years down there line

*other countries

I'm sure a lot of people would love 29k. And they know their pay is going to go up quickly after their first couple of years, to be quite high compared to the average person, anyway.

And firefighters who don't even get a full salary

To call it debt is a misnomer and detracts from your argument OP. Almost everyone leaves uni with student 'debt' (which is not debt at all) and it is paid back in line with earnings, written off after a time.

I'd also like to check your OP is accurate - you say they earn 29k - is this definitely true? I understand their salary is 29k but they then get shift allowances, other payments and so on. So, how much do they actually earn?

It's always dodgy ground to start talking just about salary because you'll have those who say they'd dream of earning £29k and someone else who says they earned double that doing a nothing job. It's all relative.

Clearly the NHS is a mess and part of that mess is terms and conditions, pay. If the market is telling us we can't attract and retain doctors, then we absolutely need to do something about it whether individual opinions say otherwise.

I don't agree with focusing on pay, or even focusing on pay being linked to level of education, but this is where i lab more to the far left. Imo, the issue is working conditions. Across the NHS there are frequent examples of appalling working conditions with too high caseloads, not enough time, poor equipment, shabby unsuitable clinic spaces, etc. If working conditions were good, and pay across all the necessary roles in society were reasonable living wages THEN things would be better. Paying Drs more doesn't solve the fundamental issue.

I was waiting for you to appear and trot out your story about all doctors being shit because you once met an F2 you didn't like.

Most people over 60 are retired. The fact you think that tiny assumption is a huge insult makes me think the rest of your story is rather embellished.

It's the way the NHS has tried to get doctors to miss their own weddings

Is that the unions central plank in the negotiations? The extraordinary amount of doctors made to jilt their future spouse at the altar? 🤔

If DH was still working in the NHS, he would be earning exactly the same as he was earning on 2003 (he was employed in a ‘hard to recruit’ area, so paid a slightly enhanced salary). However, it wasn’t the pay that put the nail in the coffin of his NHS career, it was the cuts to his (youth mental health) budget which meant he no longer felt he could provide a good or safe level of service. We moved overseas six years ago to a service which is well funded with a big multidisciplinary team which means young people get the care they need and deserve. DH is happy knowing that he can provide an effective service again. That he’s paid three times what he was earning in the UK is a bonus.
if the UK doesn’t want to haemorrhage staff, it needs to fund services properly and value the staff who work in them and not only financially, but the political will isn’t there. I’m glad we’re out of it, from a professional pov and also as a patient.

sorry working hours were horrendous but they are not even half of the weekly hours that junior doctors used to do and quite rightly so.
No one does the 100-120hr weeks which were the norm 30 yrs ago, there has been a gradual reduction over the years and a better work life balance as a result - it needed to happen.
40-48 hrs per week - is not horrific, allows a work life balance and yes you may have to work hard during those hours but so do many professions.

Nurses and doctors are not the only people who work hard when at work.

Does it have to be a fight between the public and private sector?

if you work in the private sector, can’t you support the nurses, teachers and doctors because you want people to be doing those jobs in future? Is it possible to be in the private sector and say ‘yes I will be getting 4% this year but I think the nurses should get 11% even if it increases my taxes, because I want to know there will be nurses there in future’

It doesn’t have to be a fight and a constant race for the bottom. Someone else getting a pay rise which you’re not getting isn’t an insult to you. Them possibly getting it when you aren’t, doesn’t mean you have to argue against it and not support it.

They've got their education for a fraction of what it would have cost in a different country. And they're very likely to go to that country and enjoy the higher salary there, thereby having it both ways.

I'd like doctors to be happy and fulfilled but no, I'm not shocked because I'm thinking of the years when they can make the big money to compensate and the wonderful pension scheme that almost makes the salary at that point insignificant.

@Drstrike
No, for the first time ever, most people aged 60 are still in work.
Anyway, I agree with your other points, and good luck.
(I just get fed up with assumptions about age)

You assume that it's all about doctors too though.

Part of the equation here is the level of inequality the UK has compared to other countries. Making the better off more better off has to come from somewhere.

One of the reasons our health service is so stretched is because real poverty has an impact on health and it creates more complex chronic conditions. Like diabetes.

If you want to make it easier for doctors and less stressful, you don't achieve it by necessarily throwing the money at them. It will have limited effect. You bump up the bottom wages in society and reduce the demands for ski holidays being a lifestyle essential for certain elite groups.

This sums up my experience of working in the NHS, along with a lot of my colleagues, both clinical and non clinical. The pay as such is not that much of an issue, its the demands placed upon staff wether they are in secondary or primary care that is the real issue and results in it being the norm to work way above contracted hours which leads to a host of other issues including stress and burn out.

The reason I left the NHS was not due to pay, my pension or the amount of annual leave, it was the other unwritten terms and conditions, the continual chopping and changing and reorganisations, increasing demands and the general lack of support.

Exactly this.

OP you are supported. Always some begrudgers on mumsnet who will try and guilt trip you into servitude because "we pay your salary". We'll we also pay for linekar at 1.2m per year MPs to have free travel and bars , billions on Michelle bra lady's PPE con...

There are better places to save money.

Dr's should strike.

All top earning professions are like this for the early years and medicine has amazing rewards and multiple options as you move forwards Including some if the best pensions, maternity benefits, sickness and holiday entitlements ability to combine ot move exclusively to private sector and an endless array of different specialities to follow and globally recognised qualifications.

I will tell you what shocks me though. It's the amount that the NHS pays my junior doctor relatives for their locum shifts. Daylight robbery. They are raking it in

And why exactly are these shifts available?

I will support NHS payrises when the NHS reforms itself. It's possibly the most inefficient organisation on earth, 1.7 million employees! Nearly as many as McDonalds employ worldwide! There is so much that they do that could be done instantaneously and they are still making phone calls, sending paper letters and generally acting like it's still the 1970s. In order to protect jobs.