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?

My nephew is at law school and once qualified will be earning around £120k. Whilst that’s pretty obscene for someone starting out aged 25-ish, that law firm will claw back every penny. They will make him work long hours, cancel his leave last minute etc and probably treat him like shit. I have seen it happen to others. It’s a tough life and not one to be envied either.

I think the focus needs to be less on other professions really and on improving NHS systems and conditions. It’s not just pay that’s affecting retention.

Loads of lawyers make six figure salaries.

The highest paying firms in London pay their newly qualified lawyers, who could be as young as 24, six figure salaries.

@Drstrike

I don't know if you're the best spokesperson for your cause OP. Your attitude stinks.

That's life in a profession at the start. You'll earn good money later on. Suck it up.

Is this a generational thing? People fresh out of uni expecting a pay rise and promotion and compliments every day?

Im only in my mid 30s, but when my cohort graduated we expected to work hard, learn a lot, and be paid little money initially. The real money comes later.

Absolute bollocks. GP are small business with a contractor status to SINGLE monopoly employer. They are not private business. They cannot set their own fees or contracts.

I am not surprised with the junior doctors strike and I fully support them. Unlike some posters here, I am a consultant and work with this amazing group of people daily.
Junior doctors have seen more than 25% of their salary disappear since 2008. This pay cut along with recruitment and retainment difficulties has resulted in such low morale. They work in under staffed and under resourced hospitals, this will only get worse in the future.

This is from this week BMJ... do you think any employer will be allowed to behave like this. A lot of juniors cancel their commitments at last minute if it is unsafe to the patients mostly out of their goodwill..

king's College Hospital Trust
nt
recently had to issue a statement aler junior doctors complained about an mail from the neurology department telling them that it was their "duty" fill rota shifts at short notice.
y high
sekeeping
The email read, "Having made plans' is not a good reason to refuse cover, as of course we all make plans on how we wish to spend our free time .. It is about cancelling those plans, and instead coming to work ... If itis your wedding, however, no one will want you to cancel that (unless it is too frequent an event in your life). Also one cannot be expected to cover if they are not in the country."
After receiving complaints, the
conditions trust said, "We fully appreciate the pretty
importance of all staff--including
h, and registrars- taking their full allocation le
of annual leave and maintaining a
found positive work-life balance, and this
al work
is something we continue to ask

The highest paying firms in London pay their newly qualified lawyers, who could be as young as 24, six figure salaries.

But that's tiny numbers of people and the competition for those jobs is beyond fierce. Like first in their class in Oxbridge levels. Average lawyers salaries in the U.K. are way below six figures.

You can call it bullshit. But he went to 4 days early 50s and is indeed now a partner for 2 days.
Ok he is married to another part-time medic so that helps but with more children than you .

Juniors in law, etc start on six figure salaries now and are not bringing in £££. They are straight out of Uni like the junior doctors.

Thats only magic circle firms, which will be tiny percentages of law grads.

What a backwards attitude.

My mother grew up in a rural cottage without indoor plumbing. Thank God things have moved on significantly from those days.

Back in the day, people paying on the never never usually paid above the odds for whatever goods they used/ rented. If wages had been adequate they could have saved money and enjoyed the products available in the post war period. It wasn't one bit different or morally superior as a financial choice from people putting holidays or phones on their credit cards.

Well paid jobs make the world go round. Well paid jobs make it possible for people to save for retirement, rent or buy a comfortable, safe home, and buy goods and services from businesses who employ your fellow citizens.

For me, money isn't the most important thing. What matters more to me are things like safe and sustainable working conditions and patient safety.

People go into medicine and other healthcare professions, and expect there to be long hours and hard work. What we shouldn't have had to deal with includes:

• physical violence from patients and relatives
• working 48 hours in a row fuelled only by coffee and the odd biscuit from a nurses' station
• having our friends and colleagues die because they've been so exhausted they've fallen asleep on the drive home after a shift
• risking our lives and watching our friends and colleagues in situations where mitigating measures were possible but not implemented appropriately (eg the lack of effective PPE)
• being told to "just deal with" our own healthcare needs, but being unable to actually take time to do so without being criticised for it by management
• watching patients have 'adverse outcomes' (like, you know, dying or having unnecessary complications) because there aren't enough resources to treat people safely
• having to constantly put our own lives in a distant second place to work - for example, when my DC1 died, I was being phoned that afternoon about work matters

Junior doctors and other healthcare professionals are underpaid. That's easy to see when you consider the levels of skill and training required, and the demanding nature of the jobs. It's even easier to see when you consider all the other stuff that goes along with the job.

Even if people can't or don't want to consider it from a doctor's perspective, patient safety is something that should matter to everyone.

Working conditions in public healthcare services are dire. People who work there are frequently looking to leave, and there aren't anywhere near enough people wanting to take up jobs there (quite understandably). If we don't have enough staff, we can't run a service. And if people making financial decisions (eg managing budgets in trusts, allocating national funding) don't listen to the people at the frontline when we're saying "People are going to die if you don't change things!", then, well, people are going to die because we won't have staffing or resources to prevent it.

We should support healthcare professionals on strikes - the strikes aren't about putting undeserved money into people's pockets; they're about restoring a workforce to a functional level, advocating for changes in order to protect patients, and advocating for some very brave and dedicated people to be treated with a little bit of compassion and dignity, perhaps.

They are private business and they do set their own fees for services like health insurance letters, occupational health checks etc, or any other external health services they may wish to provide. That they have a main contractor is no different from many other businesses, for example farms, legal aid law firms, many manufacturers, as well as other primary care contractors like pharmacists or dentists. Most GP businesses are Limited Liability Partnerships.

Yes but the average is brought way down by people working in high street solicitors' firms in Scunthorpe, some of whom are barely making minimum wage. These will be people who self funded their LPC as well, as those kinds of firms haven't got the budget to pay for their future trainees to go to law school.

They aren't the brightest and best in the profession, and getting those kinds of jobs isn't very competitive at all.

Lawyers working for US or magic circle firms in London and earning six figure salaries early on in their careers haven't all got a double starred first from Oxford. Loads of them have got a 2:1 in a humanities subject from a Russell Group university. One of my best friends is about 8 years qualified and works for Kirkland and Ellis. She must be earning a quarter of a million a year, with her 2:1 in English lit.

They're literally saving lives. Give your head a shake

Yes but the average is brought way down by people working in high street solicitors' firms in Scunthorpe, some of whom are barely making minimum wage. These will be people who self funded their LPC as well, as those kinds of firms haven't got the budget to pay for their future trainees to go to law school.

Thats exactly the point, there's a huge amount of variation in law. Only the best of the best are on huge salaries.

I think that's a huge difference between medicine and other professions. Expectations and progression are much more uniform in medicine. In other careers, many never break beyond the 30k/40k
barrier.

No. My sister is a doctor (not in this country). She regularly had to do 36 hour shifts and she said if she added up her hours she earned less than minimum wage. Plus her med school cost a fortune. She had seven years training before fully qualified (psychiatrist). Unless you work in the private sector pay can be much less than people think, especially considering the hours worked.

The return on investment study from the institute of fiscal studies that I just posted graphs from place law BELOW medicine.

Lawyers working for US or magic circle firms in London and earning six figure salaries early on in their careers haven't all got a double starred first from Oxford.

Perhaps not, but they'll be hugely impressive candidate for other reasons then. The numbers of people getting these jobs are tiny, compared to the number of law graduates.

Well said @Scirocco 👏👏.

I’m so sorry to hear about your DC. I’m also so sorry you were expected to carry on working, how awful 😞.

Teacher shortages are indeed scary, again there are far more issues around that than just pay, but it's definitely part of the puzzle. The reality is its bloody expensive nowadays to be able to afford even the basics, people have always struggled sure but now it's just not worth staying in a public sector job just because you're passionate about it- you have to consider the salary more and for far too long people have been taken advantage of because its their calling, their passion, they want to help. The armed forces are also at a ridiculously low level, again pay isn't the only factor but it'd help with retention for sure.

Trouble is people get very defensive over their taxes whilst seemingly forgetting that public sector workers pay tax too!

Lots of jobs are very underpaid- carers, childcare workers offensively so; the government should also be supporting these sectors but as is they're happy to just watch it all crash and burn. Sad.

I was a fully qualified lawyer on £26k. The general perception of law bears little resemblance to reality.

It's cute that you think that, but no, some of them are actually complete idiots.

Click on a few of these firm names and you'll see that London firms paying their newly qualified lawyers 6 figure salaries or not far off are not actually all that rare.

www.rollonfriday.com/inside-info

300K Mortgage hahaha, WTF do you live that any one wants to get on the ladder needs a 300k mortgage that is your issue right there.

There are pages and pages of apartments and one bed terraced houses within 20 miles of me on rightmove for 50K upwards. That argument is pure bollocks.

It's cute that you think that, but no, some of them are actually complete idiots.

look, that's just silly. They'll have beaten hundreds if not thousands of candidates up these posts, which make up a tiny percentage of all law graduates.

That's mainly because far too many people study law and then end up in low paid jobs because there is such an over supply. Medicine is different. They only recruit the numbers that will be deployed. You are trying to compare oranges and apples.

I don't disagree but most people have enough worries of their own. The most dangerous jobs tend to earn less than GPs - bin men, fishermen, policemen, etc.