Are junior docs really only on £14.09 per hour?

[yawningmorning]

That is so low.

I've seen the headline that you can earn more per hour working in pret.

No wonder they are striking.

@Alargeoneplease89
"The issue is places not salary, there are many people wanting to be doctors with very competitive places."

Part of the problem is you need training places in hospitals as well as uni places which require qualified drs with enough spare time to teach/supervise which there currently isn't.
Drs in roles are overstretched doing the 'essential care' so the ability to do the 'teaching the next generation' is limited.
You can't increase places if there isn't the people to teach in the hospitals/surgery's etc

@FormerlyPathologicallyHappy a lot of elective procedures are going to be cancelled today and there’s going to be a lot of disruption. There is no intention for lives to be lost and that’s why the strike has been planned so that consultants can cover.

It’s worth remembering that doctors graduate with a LOT of debt too after either a 5 or 6 year degree course during which having a job is pretty much impossible and the long summer holidays are lost from year 3 onwards.

I support the strike.

Many of them are. They moving to Australia where working conditions improve. We can’t appoint doctors into post here. The vacancy rate is high. Surely you should be concerned that there will be few staff to manage you or your family in emergency.

Dd is just about to do physiotherapy placement and her supervisor has already told her she will barely see her due to pressure of work. I'd imagine it's similar (and worse!) for doctors

Disgusting comment.

I bet you wouldn't like it if I accused Tory voters of being murderers now, would you?

Despite the fact that it's a decade plus of Tory cuts that have made doctors' pay and conditions so intolerable that they feel they have no option but to strike.

Junior Dr's covers the newly qualified (on the lowest pay) all the way through to consultants (highest paid). If I remember correctly a newly qualified Dr is on just under £30000 a year the 35% pay rise would give them a pay rise of just under £10500 bringing their starting pay up to just over £40000. The demand for 35% pay rise is for all junior Dr's from the lowest right through to the highest (who are on much higher wages and subsequently much higher increase).

Removing the moral questions of striking and refusing to treat even emergency patients and just dealing with the financial side the Dr's are being outrageous. No-ones pay has kept up with inflation since 2008 and I mean no-ones public or private. In reality we cannot afford to give them even a 15% pay rise across the board as that would cost billions 35% is pie in the sky territory.
The junior Dr's have lost this battle before it started and are playing straight into the hands of the government, as soon as a single patient dies whose death can be even partially attributed to the strikes the government is going to run with it and so are the press. I can already see the headlines in the mail etc about greedy Dr's demanding 35% and letting patients die and let's be honest Joe blogging on the street will agree which will allow the government to get their anti strike bill through.

Do you realise how ignorant you sound?

This isn't true. Been qualified for well over 20 years and have only just reached 6 figures as a basic.

@FormerlyPathologicallyHappy
The statistic for more than 500 people dying prematurely related to general delays in the ambulance service last year not the strikes themselves.

amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/09/more-than-500-deaths-in-england-last-year-after-long-ambulance-wait

From personal experience (waited with my mum for an ambulance for 6hrs, then spent 13hrs waiting outside a&e in the ambulance and a further 10hrs in a&e before being admitted - which didn't kill her but definitely severely affected her condition) this is really due to lack of resources generally not the strikes.

Last time there was a junior dr strike their work for emergencies was covered very well by other allied drs with good consultant and staff dr cover, people didn't 'die because of the strikes' - what it did mean was that electives and general care was delayed.
The problem is drs good will to cover those emergencies in situations like this is drying up after so many many years of the government relying on them feeling a moral duty to help and go beyond rather than giving them the support and resources they need to do their jobs properly and safely. More & more are saying that's not in my contract, nope not doing it.

It's amazing how people will say that they believe that increasing inequality is a bad thing as an abstract concept, but then start going on about doctors deserving to be paid far more than those doing jobs requiring little to no training, that they should be paid wages equal to what they'd be paid elsewhere in the world etc etc. Most highly skilled people can earn more overseas if they pick and choose where they want to go and work. Most unskilled and semi-skilled people cannot. So where do you go with this?

£14 an hour is shocking.

The doctors strike is pretty much the only one I fully support. DCs have many junior doctor friends and many NQT friends and the stress levels and conditions just cannot be compared in any way. Junior doctors are pretty much slaves to their jobs. The conditions DCs' friends have to work under has caused over half of them to leave.

What, you don't believe that pret employees earn £14 or that junior doctors earn ONLY £14 an hour?

We don't want them to go overseas though! So we need to pay them enough to keep them here and keep them functioning at an effective level, not burnt out.

It's not just about having "pity" for individual doctors though, is it? At a national level there are big shortages of doctors. As a society we need to solve this, and we won't do so by underpaying for the skilled and motivated people we need to keep us healthy.

Large numbers of doctors are already finding new jobs: if they aren't leaving the profession entirely they are choosing more and more private work. And then there are all the people who choose not to become doctors, because they choose a different degree or move away after they graduate. From my circle of friends at university I personally know one medical graduate who is a management consultant, one who's a researcher in the pharmaceutical industry and one who went into banking.

Not if they do criminal law.

I wonder if there is any scope to change/reduce pension arrangements and use that money to pay junior doctors more.

It does seem an odd situation where many doctors retire very early because their pension pot is greater than £1MM, but the starting salary for a number of years is low for a highly skilled profession.

Thats okay then.

Ugh what a shitty attitude. Good job everyone isn’t as apathetic and pig ignorant otherwise you’ll carry on waiting in a and e on the floor with your ignorant dribble yawning.

maybe there are some individuals that buck the trend, but overall, best grades at school make worse teachers. I have unfortunately taught alongside some oxbridge graduates, and on the whole they are poor teachers. good administrators though. This is a widely recognised phenomenon, to the extent that recruited ask what prospective teachers have struggled with in their own education.

Maybe because they’re the ones that are striking today 🫣 when teachers were on strike there were threads about teachers wages…

I think it distracts from the issue to compare one profession to another. The issue here is not that doctors think they should be paid more than pret workers - it's that they are asking for pay restoration because after many many years of austerity their pay has been eroded. From the BMA:

"
Fighting for pay restoration
Junior doctors have experienced a cut of more than 25% to their salaries since 2008/09. The lack of investment in wages by the Government has made it harder to recruit and retain junior doctors. This puts further pressure on the NHS and makes it harder to deliver care to the standards expected by professionals. "
Would any of us be happy to keep taking the erosion of pay? Over a similar time period MP salaries have risen by approx 30% from £65k in 2010 to £84k in 2022. How come austerity applies only to some public servants? If NHS pay had risen by the same as MPs then we would not be experiencing doctors strikes, nurses strikes, ambulance workers strikes etc etc.

So many Tory bots on these threads.

🥱

I worked with 2 salaried GPs a few years back who both left after the workload meant the salary worked out at £15 an hour due to the additional time needed to do the job safely.

Dh has worked with a couple of people in a supermarket who were qualified doctors but left due to the pay not matching the responsibilities.

I can believe the salary is that low, they need appropriate fair pay from the start.

I'm sure you could give it a go. Of course you're not clever enough to get GCSE Biology, let alone a medical degree, but I'm sure your badly-spelled post really makes these lifesavers stop and think.