How much do you think junior doctors should be paid per hour

[Jill688]

you are being unreasonable - they should be paid £14/hr

you are not being unreasonable - they should be paid more

Wasn't meant to be in bold text;
Looks like £32,000 to me (Probationer)

'How much does a Doctor make in Australia? The average doctor salary in Australia is $156,000 per year or $80 per hour. Entry-level positions start at $124,937 per year...

Entry-level positions start at $70,470 here?

medrecruit.medworld.com/jobs/listing/resident-medical-officer?workType=Permanent&location=Australian+Capital+Territory%3BNew+South+Wales%3BNorthern+Territory%3BQueensland%3BSouth+Australia%3BVictoria%3BTasmania%3BWestern+Australia&page=1&locationName=Australia

There is a massive difference between moving every 12-18 months and moving every 4 months. No comparison at all, really. Also, as a contractor, I presume you had some sort of choice as to whether you wanted to accept the contract, or whether you waited for the next one offered. In medicine, it's accept or not work at all. I am aware that the military does that kind of thing, but... that's the military!

Also, theoretically it was about education, and it probably once was, but these days, it's about service requirements.

@DifferenceEngines - what are you on about? Doctors should put up and shut up and be grateful for the privilege of serving the NHS and the great British public.

Also, I'm in Australia, and medical staff do get software training here. Why? Because medical software can be quite complex and very different from one location to the next, and because errors in using it can result in serious repercussions. It's a patient safety issue.

Many posters on this thread have made me feel soooooo grateful 🤣

Rubbish. I could just as easily move about every 4 months as I have 12. It actually makes very little difference and even less once you've become accustomed to change. Yes I made a choice as I like moving about. Doctors also make a choice, unless they're sleepwalking into these positions.

As I said I'm not just talking about my own experience but other industries/sectors have employees moving about regularly.

@SamanthaCaine - but it’s cumulative the issues that they are dealing with. If they had to deal with moving around often, but had decent working conditions and decent pay I hardly think they’d be striking.

Raising public awareness about what they face as doctors is a good thing so that people can understand the circumstances in which they deliver service.

To talk about them “whingeing” about one aspect of their professional duty does trivialise their action.

@Alexandra2001 *Why put them on a system which you ought to know is a discredited system?

Bottom line is a JD does many more years training and needs far more qualifications than a AHP/Nurse yet starting pay is, as an hourly comparison far less*

I said the payrise should be in line with AfC, as in their pay should increase the same as those on similar pay on the AfC payscale.

That's not really true. Nurse starting pay is less than FY1 starting pay for a kick-off. An FY1 hasn't done 'many more years training' than an ANP or other AHP with postgrads and prescribing.

Really? You could really find a private rental for your kids and pets every 4 months, without being given additional funding? You would really be happy with this, having made a career decision at 17 that keeps you trapped in this pattern 15 years after the career decision was made? Tell me what industry, other than the military (which comes with generous relocation packages) forcibly moves the majority of the workforce every 4 months?

You can't compare a starting nurse salary to a nurse practitioner salary, though! Two very different things!

I have just achieved consultancy after slogging it out for 14 years (mat leave, LTFT pay etc)

Here's the thing. More than 50 % of our f2 doctors don't continue into specialty training. Medical students call it f flee (as in f1, f2, f flee). The number leaving is raising every year and is projected to be at 70-80% within a few years. These are doctors who have cost a fortune to train.

They are leaving because the job is dire and they can be paid double elsewhere. Now I know we are supposed to be altruistic and all that.... But you are still helping people in Australia..... You are just being paid significantly more for it and working normal full time hours.

Now, the issue with conditions is almost entirely to do with staffing. Because doctors are leaving all the time, every rota is short a few drs. Every shift is run on minimal staffing. This means that you are constantly exhaustingly busy. This means that on night shifts when I've been vomiting, I've had an sho insert a cannula and give me anti emetics because hopefully I can pull myself together enough to run a resus and this is safer than leaving the floor uncovered. I've covered multiple clinical areas which should have each had their own doctor. This means I'm running between them all, with everyone being grumpy because they are having to wait, main lining biscuits that are hanging around, being fed cups of tea by nurses while doing paperwork and having no break in a 13+ hour shift. Meanwhile while I'm covering as much as I possibly can, on whatever pay I'm banded at, there are still gaps in the rota that can't be covered by flogging your salaried doctors.

And so....agency staff. They may or may not be competent, they rarely have logins. They need loads of support. They cost over 100 pounds an hour. I've never worked a rota that isn't using them because they are short on doctors. Makes sense as a junior doctor, give up the pressure and rat race of training, you can work when and how you want. Probably work a couple of weeks in the month and get paid equivalent to your salaried doctors (so people leave to do this too). It's pretty galling working with someone junior to you who is actually managing to contribute very little and is paid three times as much.

You pay more, less doctors leave, rotas filled, you aren't constantly working at minimal staffing, you save a shed tonne of money on locum doctors. Fewer locum doctors needed, so more of these doctors get salaried positions, even fewer rota gaps and better conditions. You would save massive agency bills anyway, but it all starts with better pay.

There's been massive pay cuts for junior doctors. I know this because I was thankfully pay protected to old contact (last year to get this thankfully) and when they made an error with my pay and put me on new contact it made a difference of about 1000 a month. Don't really know who would be happy swallowing that pay cut. When I went to med school, fy1s had free accommodation in their first year. That was taken away on my fifth year with no increase in pay and in fact they introduced parking. When I started med school the NHS had a final salary pension scheme and now it has a lifetime average.

I mean, I know we are meant to suck it up because we are helping people but it is a very bitter pill to swallow.

@LeanIntoChaos - you and others on here have shed light on your working conditions and poor remuneration and yet I suspect that Joe Public will not be able to see past the £million + pension pot, highlighted in the budget, that you all are supposedly getting.

I wasn't, I was making two separate points. PP was comparing starting wage of a junior doctor to starting wage of an AHP/nurse and saying it was less (factually incorrect). They also said a junior doctor needs far more years training than an AHP/nurse (again, incorrect if we're talking purely about FY1s and starting wage, which the Pret advert was). Once a doctor gets to the stage of 10 years training + further exams, they will easily be outearning 95% of nurses/AHPs.

@DifferenceEngines And not actually necessarily two very different things, staff nurses are band 5 and nurse practitioners can be band 6 with loss of shift allowance, so the salaries aren't that different (and the 6 may in fact take home less).

Oh for an edit button - the 5* may take home more

you and others on here have shed light on your working conditions and poor remuneration and yet I suspect that Joe Public will not be able to see past the £million + pension pot, highlighted in the budget, that you all are supposedly getting.

I suspect also people, who are on the NMW, with little prospect of ever earning materially more than that, are not going to have much sympathy with junior doctors, having the potential to earn £45,000 plus - because it’s more than they can ever dream of! I don’t think the Pret advert would help, implying doctors deserve better than the millions, doomed to live in poverty forever either? According to Glass Doors, the average barista in London earns £10 per hour.

IMO, junior doctors would do better to focus on the heavy responsibility and poor working conditions at a young age (having seen DD’s OH go through it from 2nd year medical school)?

I don’t think in terms of per hour; but I’d suggest £45,000 pa for F1s, rising to £100,000 pa for senior registrars, then £120,000+ pa for consultants - based on comparison with what DS has been earning in our profession (not the Big 4). Overtime paid appropriately per hour, which DS doesn’t get. I can’t see the NHS ever being able to afford what equity partners get, but some consultants can do private practice.

PS - my great grandfather, grandfather and his two brothers were all doctors. My great grandfather had a nice big house, a car and chauffeur and paid for all three sons to go to medical school, then gave the same amount to his daughter. How times have changed!

I doubt that doctors bemoan that they will never earn anywhere near what equity partners in, say law, earn despite that after a certain point they too are at the top of their field. In some cases, because of their specialty, they’ll be doing a job that very few people can do.

But they should expect to be paid a handsome salary, deserving of their training, skill and responsibility.

Even if only for purely selfish reasons and in the interest of protecting the service that most of us will rely on, to varying degrees, I would think that the public would want to see doctors well paid?

At the end of the day, as a medic posted upthread, it matters, not what the public perceives they should be paid.

They will continue to leave at this rate and we will continue to bemoan long appointment waiting times, poor delivery of service and the general state of the NHS.

This truism applies to the NHS too - you get what you pay for.

the reason the wages are so high overseas is because they have private healthcare. We don’t. We tend to think this is a good thing.

There is a limit to how many medical students we can train at our universities and give foundation years training to in our NHS. Medicine is the most oversubscribed university subject. We should ONLY be offering places for UK students to study at UK universities if they buy in to the UK healthcare system and sign up to a certain length of time working in the NHS. I have no interest whatsoever in training UK students who then piss off overseas. It’s abhorrent and must be stopped.

I doubt that doctors bemoan that they will never earn anywhere near what equity partners in, say law, earn despite that after a certain point they too are at the top of their field.

DD’s OH (a GP now) always bemoans the fact, he doesn’t earn more than DS! He says he went into the wrong profession!

Yeah, I think we all have a wonder about what we could have earned elsewhere…

If you don’t want us to leave then support fair pay and fair conditions.

Because JD feel they have no loyalty to the NHs due to being infantilised, overworked, undertrained and pretty are angry right now.

And Consultants are feeling that too! For the more recently qualified we are like frogs that have been tossed in boiling water, but for the cons they just keep turning up the heat!

Why can't you increase the number of medical student places? Australia nearly doubled the number of medical student places about 15 years ago. It turns out that that was a very necessary move.