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?

You won't see me campaigning for doctors personally. Many come from already wealthy backgrounds and have a perfectly healthy salary to aspire to.

That clearly was not the point being made.

I agree that doctors should be paid more than bin men, but I don't think £29k is an unreasonable starting salary. Slightly more than teachers' (except ones working in London). Most teachers would agree that the problem with teaching is not actually the pay.

@Drstrike

I'm saying other graduates entering the workforce going into graduate schemes typically have 4 years of debt now. The normal pay is £27-32k straight out of university. I have young adults at home - £28k is a good salary straight out of university, and DD's job is arguably as responsible as any dr. It's normal, doctors aren't any more special than others also on the government payroll. All stem graduates here

£51k is very good after 5 years (so still under 30yo), and £58k is an excellent salary - particularly if you are outside the SE. Is that the maximum before taking on additional responsibilities? For comparison, UK median wage is £33k. Top 10% is anyone over £62.5k.

I really think that lots of higher earners forget how little other people get paid.

It's not that the dustman's skills are worth more or equal, it's that he hasn't had the benefit of all that training and doesn't have a stellar career mapped out. What he earns now is close to what he'll earn forever.

When left school, friends who took shop work earned much more than me in my job "with prospects". It wasn't because their job was more valuable but because mine was more attractive.

Doctors are paid more than enough. There's no justification for them to be paid even more.

Sounds alright. They are learning and supervised. After 5 years they are earning more than most people can ever dream of.
Virtually all professionals start on lower wages. Do you think a newly qualified doctor should earn as much as a doctor who's been doing the job for 10 years?

No, I think that's a fair starting point for a junior who has the potential to progress their career and be very well remunerated. It's similar in lots of graduate careers.

With the volume of information online, it's very easy to get a handle on what a job is and what the earnings will be for different stages of that career. It's far more accessible than it's ever been. It's well known now that teaching is a ballache on every front hence the recruitment crisis.

I'd like better conditions for Jnr doctors.

But if there were no sanitation the effect on public health would be terrible. Probably worse than if there was a Jnr doctor strike.

Don't be a snob. 30-40k training wage is decent. Conditions are poor. You'll win no friends being snotty about sanitation workers and other vital roles.

The £1 million plus pension limit is being lifted in the budget mainly for doctor retention. I’m sure they will survive.

Nurses garner far more sympathy from me.

The other factor is the sacrifices to their personal life. Someone that goes to med school
for 6 years at 18, then two years of foundation training, then three years of speciality training and three years of higher speciality - with 48 hour weeks as standard will struggle to have much of a personal life outside of work and if they're female will mostly not be in a position to start a family until they're into their 30's.

I know, I know, they know this before they start, but 'knowing this' at 16/17 when you're sitting your A levels and applying, and living it when you're ten years older are entirely different.

Being 25/26 with no time for a relationship while attending friends' weddings and seeing them settled with babies, with the shadow of £85k debt and a salary of £30k - so take home of about £2k/month. In some places it's around £1k to rent a room plus exams to pay for along with all the usual outgoings of bills, food, professional looking workwear, travel etc - then for those that are in relationships having leave denied to attend their own weddings or parents funerals.

'But you'll be paid really well in another ten years' isn't much consolation for having so much stress/responsibility and so little life from the age of 16 until your mid 30's

Instead villifying junior doctors for standing up for some kind of quality of life because their very eventual salary will be good, ask yourself, if you were a straight A* student who could pick pretty much any career path, would you swap your life for theirs?

It’s obscene that we reward bankers more than we reward doctors. Obscene. This culture is broken.

I imagine the point here was that many of these essential jobs are zero hour contracts.
So not only do these people do jobs that many wouldn’t want to do, at antisocial hours, but they are still not guaranteed to earn enough to pay the bills at the end of the month.

Perhaps the interview for medical school should include explaining the pay structure and progression in profession? I assume it doesn’t as they would expect these highly intelligent educated applicants would have researched the profession they were going to spend 5 years study to be part of?

I do think that NHS professional where university education is required should have their fees adjusted for - perhaps after working for the NHS in the role they were trained for, for say double course length then the tuition fees should be written off… (So would include nurses, paramedics etc as well as doctors.)

I’ve paid £210 for a private consultation with a menopause specialist. That was for 30mins. Doctors have the potential to earn a lot of money outside the NHS. All graduates have loans. Yes they work very hard I agree.

It's outrageous

That is the whole crux of the matter "we" don't reward bankers They generate the money that pays them. We, the taxpayer, do pay doctors.

Agreed

Doctors "in training" are not just in training though. They are the work force of the hospital, professionals in their own right doing gruelling jobs, with unsociable hours treating and meeting people in their hours of greatest need. May not get a break during a 13 hour night shift, will often leave late as patient safety and needs trump the fact they have home responsibilities.
The lack of depth of numbers and other health care professionals puts them at risk of burn out and moral injury as they juggle the needs of multiple patients, their own (very expensive) continued professional development and exams.
If the conditions were ok perhaps the pay wouldn't matter
the strike is for pay BECAUSE the conditions are atrocious and the service the NHS gives has broken beyond all recognition from 20 years ago.
Neglect of the people and the service has caused a crisis.

Yes they chose their career...to help people usually, people don't go into it for pay usually.....there are much easier ways for very intelligent, multiply qualified people to earn £40,000.but they do need to be paid appropriately.

I think that’s a completely decent salary. I have lots of doctors in my family.

Doctors, particularly at the junior stages, should be paid far more. The responsibility of their job and the constant exams and pressure are huge. I wouldn’t want my children to go into it

No, and anyone entering the profession knows this

its like lawyers etc, lots of dosh out and poor pay at the start leading to much higher salaries as you progress

Instead villifying junior doctors for standing up for some kind of quality of life

The OP isn't about working conditions or quality of life. It's about pay. Junior doctors are decently paid given their experience and fact that they're still training.

If the OP was talking about wanting working conditions improved I'd be 100% behind her. Same with teachers (I am one), the conditions are horrific and need to be addressed. I know zero teachers who left the profession over pay - it was all about the conditions.

As a doctor I'm not too concerned by the starting salary. I wasn't particularly well off as a junior doctor, especially considering the big financial burden of exams and registration fees, but I got by and now as a GP earn pretty decent money (albeit substantially less than many on Mumsnet sbd the Daily Mail seem to think). My big, big concern is working conditions. Since graduating medical school I have probably managed to get a proper lunch break on maybe 5% of days. The vast, vast majority of the time I either eat at my desk while doing prescriptions/ take a bite of a sandwich between each patient, or sometimes just don't manage to eat at all. There have been countless shifts where I have been both very dehydrated and bursting for a pee because I haven't had a chance to drink or go to the toilet for nearly 12 hours. The workload can be so far beyond being doable that it is all I can do to try to prioritise the tasks that are most likely to stop anyone coming to serious harm and an forced to accept otherwise providing suboptimal care as it's simply impossible to do anything like the amount of work that is required, even if I come in very early and leave hours after my shift ends. I have remote access at home so I can spend my evenings catching up on admin that I haven't had a chance to glance at during my working day.
This suboptimal care understandably results in angry patients and families who want to shout and rant at me, and as unpleasant as that would be on its own, it's compounded by a feeling of panic because I simply don't have time to be shouted at, there is just so, so much to do.
Things are worse since Covid. Hospital waiting lists have expanded to the point that we are trying to manage patients in the community for 1-2 years while they wait for a hospital appointment, when everything we can do has long been exhausted.
It's also so demoralising opening the newspaper to see yet another article about how lazy GPs are sitting with their feet up raking it in while not seeing any patients. It's so polar opposite to the experience of myself and every GP I know, who are working harder than we ever have in our lives in the face of crippling pressure, having unprecedented numbers of patient contacts (including face to face) every day.

I must admit I have often pondered moving abroad to become a doctor in Australia or New Zealand, but it's nothing to do with money, even though I would make substantially more money over there.

This thread is depressing. There is a massive amount of snobbery going on, and saying a newly qualified professional at anything straight out of university should be worth more than a hardworking working class person (binman was the example) is ridiculous.
The fact is that this country does not have enough money to pay everyone what they would like and probably what they deserve. We would need tax rises, a slash to benefits and some pretty fierce border controls to put public sector wage where they really should be.