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?

We don't improve conditions by paying more though. That almost legitimises the poor conditions to do that. Extra money would be better spent on free education and staff across the board for the NHS.

There's a good comfortable lifestyle and then there's skiing holidays and enormous houses that aren't essential but are framed as such.

And you don't think that lower debt and higher wages might be part of changing that?

It does. In fact banking pays extra through the banking surcharge.

Why is it that people can’t have sympathy for hard working conditions in a number of occupations? Just because other occupations might have worse pay or also have bad conditions, doesn’t mean people can’t look at Doctors in the NHS and say that the conditions are intolerable.

It’s not a question if who has got it worse in life. Don’t we want better public services because they benefit us? A key feature of getting them is for them to be properly funded, so then wages and working conditions can be decent and attract staff. Why wouldn’t people want that?

Most are fucking off though which is the problem. Personally I'd quite like to live in a county that has adequate levels of medical staff and teachers, I doubt that's a particularly high aspiration. Also train strikes weren't actually about pay, it was largely about a change to conditions but you can only strike legally for certain conditions- pay being the main one. Then you use your voice from the media attention etc to go through more of the issues

I don't disagree, no reasonable person would, but the way you've said this has got backs up.

FY1s make good money, as do B5 nurses, but the salary doesn't line up to the level of responsibility. Poor pay is driving up vacancies, which makes the NHS provide worse care with bad dorking conditions. All the while clinical staff who are willing to work locum/agency rake it in.

Your inference was that a bin man is less valuable than a doctor. If you read what I wrote, you would see that I agree that you should earn more and have better working conditions, so am, in fact, supporting your argument. I just don’t think it’s necessary to make comparisons of the sort you made.

I agree that the business model is poor and I said that too. A better distribution of funding is necessary.

It’s very apparent that you are angry, but castigating people who are generally in agreement with you is not supporting your cause.

Many careers require better remuneration and working conditions. Some are overpaid and underworked. I gave examples.

And? They will make a shit ton of money later on. The people I feel sorry for are those who did expensive qualifications but won’t make that amount, like PhD graduates or people who studied history or something.

The post wasn't about working conditions. It was specifically about pay.

I agree, in both the teachers' and NHS recruitment/retention crisis, pay is not the issue. Working conditions are tough and no amount of money will make that OK.

This doesn't surprise me. I thought it was fairly well known.

I think it will take much much much more than that to enable working class folks to get into medicine.

That plan both long and short term alone will only enable already wealthy people to be even richer.

The comparison with a binman was made by someone else and twisted into my randomly denigrating manual workers 🙄

More money will reduce vacancies which will improve working conditions.

We are doctors and nurses in the UK, they just work locum

Oh please, a large hospital will never have just 1 junior on call overnight for the whole place. Nursing definitely needs to be better paid, doctors, not so sure. They know what they're signing up to, all our salaries are public knowledge etc. Conditions aren't anywhere near as bad as they used to be, rotas are much more fair.

I think part of the problem with NHS staff (and teaching) pay rates is their pension schemes are good but VERY expensive for the taxpayer. I know they pay towards them but no private pension scheme comes anywhere near the cost of the public sector scheme. Would doctors, nurses and teachers agree to halve their pensions in order to get better pay? I doubt it!

So sorry to read about the vandalism. There's a lot of messenger blaming going on. Good luck with your new life.

I think its reasonable for a starting wage for an inexperienced member of staff. Being a doctor is no different to any other job you need to work your way up and gain experience before it starts really paying off.

There plenty of doctors who earn well into 6 figures. There is a straightforward career path. So you start with a low salary, but you know how to get more. One would hope that a qualified doctor would have some brain, certainly enough to do a little bit of research before embarking on their career to find out what is the starting salary for a junior doctor. Why all the complains?

Nursing salaries are also public knowledge. By your argument, they also knew what they were getting into, so don't deserve a pay rise either.

Pretty much everyone from a band 4 up won't get their lunch break (unpaid but part of the hours). In fact I'm a 5 and eating my lunch at the mo but am on call so at the mercy of the phone regardless.

Nurses will say to me that it's a terrible salary for them etc, but when challenged on taking a private sector nursing job instead, they say that they would never leave the NHS! It's a culture thing.

I think the salaries and conditions of junior doctors is disgraceful.

What shocks me is the mealy-mouthed attitude of some MNers whose response doesn't go further than 'anyone who earns tuppence halfpenny more than me ought to consider themselves lucky, and why should they whinge?'

So many threads on MN reveal that thousands of MN young graduates go straight into jobs paying £50-100k before they reach the age of 30. (haha not me!). In fields such as marketing, sales etc. Medicine entails high skill level, high responsibility hard work and long hours.

We need to look at the bigger picture, not moan in case another £1 is added to our tax bill, but interrogate and lobby the government to sort this out at source. And not by robbing the low income hard pressed.

Then we can stop sneering, maybe.

Yes. I'm sure a lot of the critics on this thread are doing a 9-5 WFH on £30k or more.

The problem is that public health is in crisis worldwide due to a lack of doctors, nurses and specialists training. Those that do emigrate to countries that pay better like Australia and NZ.

I would be happy to pay more taxes to pay for doctors and nurses to have their training paid for and higher wages, in return for them to work x numbers of years in the public system (or to leave early they must repay a partial amount of training costs based on years worked.)

Those with high grades now move into stem subjects which not only pay better have better work/life.

people have got to move past these jobs being vocations, and pay them properly.

More staff would improve work conditions and patient experience. Better patient experience and better conditions for staff would mean the money demands are less 'we demand / deserve' this for putting up with the conditions for simple reasons like patients would be less shitty!

I fail to see how paying more will attract more people to the profession tbh. You will attract more if it's somewhere better to work and it's rewarding as a job.

The race to the bottom for me is doctors demanding more money due to the conditions being terrible. Not the other way round. That's just normalising crap working practices and systems.