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.

I actually think anyone who degrades doctors and the work they do should be precluded from medical treatment, but apparently that's not allowed.

I was a junior doctor in the early 2000s and it nearly broke me. Unbearably long hours, constant sleep deprivation, dealing with death on a daily basis and the mismatch of public expectations with what the nhs could deliver (even 20 years ago). It is the pits of a job and juniors now are earning similar to what I took home 20 years ago. I stayed in medicine just about and was close to a breakdown and was treated for anxiety as a result of the work. I’m now a consultant psychiatrist and things are really really grim. I’m my service we have 25 substantive posts. 11 are filled. The pressures are unbearable and people are retiring early, locuming and moving abroad (Australia and New Zealand are doing very well in recruiting U.K. doctors). Our service is so depleted that we have had to stand down routine out patient services as there are simply no doctors to take up the posts. I can assure anyone here that I have strongly advised my children against a career in medicine.

not only is pay being cut in real terms, conditions are dreadful and there is no hope on the horizon. But please remember that no doctors will mean reduced/ suspended services as is the case in my trust and this effects all of us.

It's not totally unreasonable to be comparing the junior doctor starting wage with the experienced barista wage.

The starting salary for a junior doctor in their forst post is £29.4ish kpa (don't have the exact figure to hand but definitely below 30) but that's after 7 years in university with a gruelling workload requiring a lot more than 40 hours a week of studying.

If they hadn't bothered with the medical degree and had put that 7 years of dedicated, single minded effort and commitment to excellence into being the best barista they could, then yes they would be on the top rate that pret offers after those 7 years.

However the analogy does then break down, because 14 years later the medical doctor will have at least doubled that salary, and in the cases of the top consultants will have much higher multiples of that, whereas the talented barista might possibly hope to have moved into pret store management but will likely still be under £40k.

Also, the £14.09 per hour is accurate if calculated on the assumption of working just a 45 hour week. In reality many will end up working a lot more than this, but there are attached enhancements for those which would make for maths too complicated to use in a campaigning slogan.

And how many people are dying due to retention issues, burn out issues. Have you walked past an a and e on a normal day lately and seem the queues of ambulances? Nobody is listening to any of us. Middle managers stay in their roles for 2 years, warm their seat and move on so they don’t care. NHS clinicians are burnt out. And all you lot can do is yawn and bitch and make stupid lazy comparisons.

Plenty of others? If that were the case, we wouldn't be in the crisis that were in now. You sound silly and very ignorant!

Also agree

Fine, take that attitude, but don’t come on here whining when you can’t get a GP appointment because there aren’t enough people who are prepared to put up with the shit hours, the (relatively) shit pay and the shit attitude from people like you to do the job.

You're not bothered if there's insufficient doctors to treat you or your family? Are you planning to treat them yourself?!

The problem is, doctors at this level are still very junior. They're being trained in different areas and don't know very much. A lot of what they're doing is really just an apprenticeship and has to be supervised or checked by someone else. Or it should be! They're not always working so much as learning, but decision making so much as being trained to think through the decision making process.

When they can do more advanced medical care they are paid much more.

The guy at Pret is an experience, dedicated employee on that money and he's gone as far as he can go.

High flying professionals have a long way to go after graduating and huge amounts of time and money still have to be put into them by the government to turn them into a doctor that you can release into a specialty.

I’m a doctor working in another country and 💯 support the junior doctors strike. Yes, their eventual earning potential is high but I know of no other profession where training causes such disruption to your personal and domestic life as medicine. I also know of no other profession where the prospect of being sued/complained about/in front of the regulator (GMC) is a certainty during your career. It just isn’t comparable to other professions. If people in the UK want the best possible care by the best people rather than consultant posts being filled by mediocre candidates because there is no competition then you should absolutely support the strike.

Haven't read the whole thread. And no comment on whether pay rises deserved or not.
However, I think it is disengenuous to play the pay/hr card when on a salary. Lots of people do extra hours over and above contracted, when on salaries and most don't get overtime either.
Using CPI rather than RPI is also imo bad form. No-one uses that, not even the independent financial institutions.

I'm not sure whether there is much support for their 35% demand.

No skin in the game, but the sector who are the most behind in pay terms are lecturers, and they get little or no support from the public at all.

Fully agree and we should do the same for every other job, so those Drs and supporters on the numerous other threads denigrating lower paid workers should not be allowed any of their services or resources too.

Why can't we level out doctors earnings more evenly across their careers? Seems daft that they are treated like crap and paid relatively poorly for the 1st 10 years, then they become consultants and earn silly money. Noone really needs hundreds of thousands of pounds per annum. I don't think the public sector should pay any salaries that high, in any sector (e.g local govt / universities)

Also, this is nonsense. The “junior” doctor is the first person you meet in the A&E Dept, at the outpatient clinic or on the ward if you become acutely unwell. They are under very indirect supervision for the majority of their training and carry a huge amount of responsibility, particularly out of hours. They are not being minded and mollycoddled through their training as you suggest.

Junior Drs have always been paid badly ,there is good earning potential once they reach consultant level but it can take years to reach that level
When I first qualified as a nurse in the mid 90,s the working conditions of junior Dr,S appaling, they could be working alongside the consultant 9-5 and then be on call from 5 untill 9 am the next day ,or work.a full week and be on call over the weekend ,I think they had to reduce,junior doctors working hours with European working time directives .,not saying it's much better now ,but it was horrendous before .

Except they won't, we have a shortage of doctors. And why are you happy to waste the cost and time of training them?

I think junior doctor pay is truly shocking. I'm a teacher and I think junior doctors should absolutely be paid more. I don't think comparing teacher and doctor pay is particularly helpful.

I very much agree with this.

Also the hours expected from junior doctors are ludicrous. I know it's just a book, but does seem to chime with some real live experiences in 'This is going to Hurt' where senior consultants are pushing the responsibility and hours on to the junior doctors.

The pension arrangements for the current junior doctors are already different to those close to retirement now. It is the pay erosion and change in conditions which is a factor in this strike. However it is also patient saftey but this cannot be the ballot reason for strike, nor can pension rules.

I’m junior doctor.
The pay is worth 25-30% less than 10 years ago, this is the same for many public sector workers with pay freezes and below inflation rises but this can only be swallowed for a certain about of time. Now with inflation being around 10% it has become a real struggle. If rises had been at inflation or closer to it for the last 10 years people wouldn’t be asking for such big rises. This is the same for teachers, police, firefighters, (who have agreed 12% over 2 years), paramedics, nurses, civil servant workers (the list goes on). Each of those have pressures, poor conditions etc. I do not compare my job to my teacher friends etc, of course they deserve pay rises. It isn’t a race to the bottom- in an ideal world we would all have pay restored. Also asking for this high amount is because we are talking about 23/24 (we got 2% in 22/23 which will be not rediscussed) while the nurses etc are all striking over last years pay and pay moving forward so headline figures for settlements in the end may look different but over multiple years may look more similar. Secondly it’s an opening demand- the government are refusing to even sit down with us. I and many of my colleagues will settle for less but you have to start somewhere.

There are conditions to my work that people don’t even realise. I move post every 6 months- working in different teams, different specialities and even different hospitals with different systems I have to learn on my feet. I’ve had friends move 200 miles with no choice and only 8 weeks notice as that is where they are told to go. I regularly get called on my day off asking me to come in and cover and even had an argument with an administrator for 20 minutes that I wasn’t coming in on my day off as I had no childcare options- I was then told my childcare arrangements were not robust enough and I really needed to think about how I could meet the needs of the ward in the future. I already pay a premium for flexible childcare and extra care as I can never guarantee my finish time. For a 9 hour shift- I pay for 11 hours of care in the hospital nursery. This is the norm from my experience. I’ve missed funerals, struggled to plan my wedding as I couldn’t get my rota that far in advance to ensure I had time off. This doesn’t even cover my conditions during my actual working hours short staffed, no breaks etc.

Ive been told to leave if I don’t like the conditions. We already are and even if you increase training places etc. you won’t be able to plug the gap quickly. As a society we seem to say well it was worse for me in my job etc. so suck it up. As I said it isn’t a race to the bottom, we should be striving for better for everyone, no dragging everyone down.

I stay in the profession as I care for my patients, there are days I really enjoy my job and I feel like I make a difference. Unfortunately those days are becoming less frequent due to the conditions.

Full disclosure I am not striking as I don’t agree with the 72 hour strike of full withdraw of care but I do support my striking colleagues.

Another day another WWwwaaaaa from the over paid over privileged. All we see is pay this pay that, your winning zero support.

It's all about money, every single thread is started with moaning about we want more money.

It's totally unreasonable and the BMA should be ashamed for coming up with such an unintelligent, base level advert.

By all means, compare it to the NMW but ultimately what's the point? The public aren't responsible for pay. We pay the required taxes, can vote parties in/out but that's it. I'll support anyone's right to strike but public knowledge of pay doesn't really achieve a lot. I don't know why the public sector has such an obsession with it TBH.

Also a 40 hour/week degree is not gruelling. Hard, yes but lots of non medical undergraduates do 40 hours/week. I did.

I guess it's a reward for all the training and exams they have had ti.do and once Drs reach consultant level ,they will be very experienced and i
knowledgeable, it's an incentive to carry on?

Never get ill then?

'Junior' covers a wide range of levels of expertise. If you are a doctor, you will know that this is an accurate description of what the job is like at the beginning and for quite some time after that. As they advance, they become better paid and handle more responsibility. They are called junior at stage too, but their pay at that point is not being highlighted today, hence my talking about the initial stages.

NHS consultants earn a max of 120k a year. It's hardly tech company levels.