£14 an hour for a doctor ?!

[gardenlife]

Junior doctor says she can't afford to start family www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-65275409

Wait hang on - the article shows the payslip and this doctor is only on £14 an hour. Having to lay in excess of £1600 for their own exams.

That's not much more than minimum wage is it? Yes she has £80k plus debt from studies.

I agree with minimum wage being increased but this is closing the gap between non professional jobs and professionals

Surely they deserve more?

In my opinion, they are not paid enough, and surely the fact that they keep leaving the nhs, or pan to leave the nhs within a couple of years to go overseas.

also whilst I agree teachers are underpaid, you don’t need to work night shifts, or work 12 hours in a single shift. Also if you make a mistake you don’t risk killing someone. There is a difference in skill between a dr and a teacher.

Of course they get paid extra for unsociable hours etc… this is to ‘compensate’ for the impact it has on your life. Google the long term impact of working regular night shifts… literally taking years off your life.

Overtime pay is paid if you come and do an additional shift but not for all the times you regularly stay hours after your shift, you just have to suck that up.

Hourly pay isn't a good metric for comparison, particularly in the early years of jobs with traditionally long hours. Many qualifying in other professional roles will be looking at similar. You just can't compare that with a cleaner doing X hours here and there.

It's a starting salary with the potential to earn a lot more after a few years.

My sister was a teacher for many years and i dont disagree that she put in a lot of work after school hours ,however junior Drs like nurses ,are expected to work night shifts ,weekend i,s e actually be at the hospital responsible for patients care ,xmas ,bank holidays etc i wasent,a Dr but i was a nurse for many years they earn their unociable hours its really not comparable to teaching .

I think the point most people are missing is that most people don’t make life or death decisions on every shift. Regardless of whether £14 is increased by a shift allowance its still woefully inadequate. My daughter is a nurse and tells me first hand what the junior doctors do for there money. I completely support them. The billions wasted on faulty PPE could have fine towards this.

@Soontobe60 Teachers work contracted weekends, twilights and nights? When did this start? And how many human beings have you resuscitated as a teacher? Do you routinely manage people who are hypoxic and blue because they can’t oxygenate their own blood? Or try to stop someone bleeding out? Or choking on their own vomit? You are comparing apples and oranges. It’s not a race to the bottom.

@Basildeleaf where did you hear this incorrect information from? No doctor in training is on 70K in their 20’s. You are possibly getting confused with long term locums who are paid a much higher hourly rate and fill in rota gaps.

You may have degrees/masters etc, but you certainly do not have people lives at the tips of your fingers and families to support when it all goes wrong.

The ‘overtime’ of teachers is comparable to the rafts of ‘mandatory training’ (and I mean hours!) of it that is required to be completed in their own time. And I doubt the ‘unsociable hours’ compare with Christmas morning while your kids are opening their presents, all for the staggering heights of Sunday pay!!!

I'd say that's an unusual payslip for an FY1. Most will be receiving an enhanced hours and weekend supplement on top.

So it’s acceptable for these doctors to have to work weekends and nights to make ends meet?

Total pay appear high but they have to work a lot of hours to get that - nights, weekends, bank holidays. If they worked a standard 40 hour week then their salary will be paltry

Going off on a tangent ,my son was recently in critical care ,the vast majority of the nurse,s working in criticsl care are only paid at band five ,i saw what they do and they really have to have an awful lot of knowledge and expertise,as part of their contract they have to do a masters ,and their is no gurantee of promotion to band six ,imo,all the nurses working on critical care should be paid at least a band six.

And don’t confuse unpaid overtime and paid overtime. Paid overtime is not actually overtime, it’s contractual.
There are hours and hours and hours of unpaid overtime that NHS staff do (doctors, nurses, AHPs etc). The whole thing would have folder decades ago otherwise.

Not sure where you've got that from. I'm 10 years in and not on that

Where did I say that? What I said, which is true (see the full facts link someone posted) was that that FY1 payslip is unusual.

Just about all junior doctors work evenings and weekends, it's part of the role, it's not something done to make ends meet.

This makes no sense, given that they graduate at age 24.

Depending on the old banding. I had 2 jobs (gp and anaesthetics/icu) but there's loads like sexual health psych etc that dont have oncalls so the pay drop is dramatic on those rotas (also nice to not work weekends/nights and feel slightly human again) but I had to work extra shifts to cover expenses during them

That is literally her first payslip after medical school. It increases annually with experience and there's extra for anti social shifts. It's in line with other stem graduates including those with PhDs. Doctors start on £29k I believe outside of london, a salary higher than many people in very responsible jobs with years of experience.

Read full fact for full information, that figure was misrepresented.

I asked a friend what he earned (he's just become a consultant) prior to promotion and he said £58k not a low salary

I more concerned about their working conditions. That would be a fine salary for a 37 hour week with good support, a well managed environment, modest case load etc. But they appear to be working under impossibly stressful conditions that no amount of money would make ok. And that's before we mention the impact on patients.

There is just this gradual attrition of all our wages. I guess doctors and nurses are wanting not to put up with it.

None of us should be. ‘They’ (governments, capitalist class, the 2640 billionaires & suporters, the financial system decision makers) are pushing our incomes and quality of life lower and lower. They are making us spend more of our salaries on fuel and essentials.

Where is this going? How long are we going to put up with it? A lot of people on MN are probably doing ok. But how representative is this?

My husband earns circa £50k for running a restaurant???

I don't want to make this a race to the bottom, but as a legal aid lawyer I was making £15k as a first year trainee and £18k as a second year trainee, and then in the first 8 years of practice I was earning maximum of £28k. No I wasn't doing resuscitation but I was trying to stop social services removing children for adoption, forever. The social workers on these cases were also on low wages for very high stress jobs. Based on the emails I sent and received lots of us were working into the night unpaid.

The problem is that the government doesn't appreciate any of us, doctors, teachers, lawyers, nurses, social workers, who spend a long time qualifying and get into debt to try and give back to society. I would happily pay more tax for better paid public sector workers.

I do think though that there has been a naivety in the PR the doctors have put out, we all know that consultants are well paid (as they should be) and regularly tweeting F1 payslips is making people start to eyeroll and say 'yes but in 10 years you'll be loaded'... The focus needs to be on global comparators of salary, brain drain and working conditions.

I love the fact that these striking junior doctors seem to be an average age of 25 ? But they want backpay for their proffesion being underpaid from 15 years ago !!! Ffs they were probably not even doing a paper round and want a pay rise backdated to their 11th birthday ..wake up and smell the roses doctor ..your suffering from a severe case of STUPIDITY ..and they seem to be struggling with basic maths because that £14 an hour figure that they keep spouting about just doesnt add up

£58k is an unacceptable salary for someone role just before becoming a consultant.

Kinda depends on your speciality. Obviously when you start your generally well supported but can guarantee as an anaesthetist/ icu doctor patients can very easily die on the end of my syringe of drugs and yes every patient requires multiple life and death decisions as we artificially prevent them breathing and take it over alongside controlling other organ systems

(similarly surgeons with a knife in their hand, medics needing to defib abnormal rhythms, fixing potentially fatal electrolyte conditions, most decisions we make hags a degree of life and death but we get slightly desensitised to it as it's all we do/know