To think the BMA have misjudged with another doctor's strike?

[Locutus2000]

Last year they got more than anyone else in the NHS along with an improved deal. Nurses and other AHPs received lower rises.

BMA have just announced another 'resident' doctor strike continuing to chase pay restoration to 2008 levels.

Having just had the major win with changes to IMG prioritisation and the clamp-down on PAs it feels a bit tone-deaf and I can't see Streeting going for it.

Well they could then pay for their own training and go. The reason they would get debt relief is because they are tied to the NHS. They would have a choice between paying for their degree like everyone else or not.

The nhs is cutting thousands of admin jobs. Just saying.

As always poetryandwine is right.

F1 is a silly place from which to make comparisons. The contract was revised substantially in about 2015, to make life far easier. Shorter working hours, less responsibility, more support and dedicated study time.

However health is a devolved issue so this is only England. The other component countries of the UK have their own contracts. DD is not in England, but in a poorer bit of the UK which cannot afford the English F1 contract so still used the 2005 one. So longer hours including more nights and weekends, more responsibility, compulsory training is often in her own time, and she gets less pay. Much closer to the traditional image of the harried F1, racing round a hospital at night carry the bleep.

In many ways she does not mind. She is getting bags of hands-on experience and lots of responsibility, and it is only two years. (Plus she does so much overtime that her take home is fine.) Wordloads elsewhere can be a lot lighter and many F1s are not even asked to do nights.

The problem is that if she wanted to get onto training she would have been expected to get home after a 13 hour night shift and get out the books, so she could compete for exams set nationally against both F1/F2s on English contracts and those overseas who have paid for college courses designed to help meet the NHS selection criteria. Alternatively, her original plan was to work flat out for F1/F2 and then take some sort of year long contract (teaching fellow or similar) with time to study. But since Boris' changes opening up the newly qualified doctor job market to worldwide competition, she would have needed to have devoted her limited spare time to making job applications. With no priority for those already in the UK, entry level jobs are attracting up to 2,000 applications from all over the world. If you don't have the experience it is hard to compete with doctors with experience who see NHS salaries, coupled with accelerated family settlement rights, as extremely attractive.

Young doctors are not choosing to go to Australia or New Zealand. They have to go because people like Dr Melissa Ryan have taken the UK training opportunities they need. New Zealand prioritises their own. We need to otherwise it is a huge waste of young futures and taxpayer money. How dare she then use our F1s as justification for people like her, already on training programmes, to be paid more.

What a shocking self-centred approach.

Yes, I’ve lost sympathy with the NHS. It’s all had billions more thrown at it, and it gets more useless by the day.🙄

As it should. So many letters seem to be sent its as if some departments are yet to learn about email.

I agree.

Attendance allowance, jobseeker’s allowance, personal independence payments, universal credit, housing benefit, income support, statutory maternity and paternity pay, statutory sick pay and public sector pensions are all linked to CPI. Junior doctors' salaries are now only 4.7% less than in 2008/9, based on CPI (not "20% in real terms" that the BMA claims).

Furthermore, in 2008/9 (which is the year chosen by the BMA juniors for comparison purposes) the European Working Time Directive wasn't fully implemented and junior doctors then were working longer hours - an average of 56 hrs per week vs 48 hrs subsequently. They also less well educated now on average, they are given less responsibility, and they are less productive - despite the BMA's posturing about them being "expert clinicians".

As I said on another thread, the only good thing that can be said for this is that two thirds of junior doctors do not support the strike. It is unfortunate that the minority are making them all look bad.

The NHS is in danger of losing public support.

It was interesting to see three senior policemen from the North West last week talking about the need to get back to basics in order to restore public trust.

I think the NHS is reaching that point. For all we are expected to believe it is wonderful, more and more individual experience is that it is not. My own GP does not even have a physical premises and I have not been able to get a face to face appointment for a long standing problem. If I am forced to go private (at the moment I am trying Dr Google and an internet prescription, which may actually be working) I am damned if I support more money going into a service I cannot access.

In fairness Wes seems to be doing his best with his bonfire of NHS quangos and his 10 year plan. Too early to know whether he is saving the NHS or adding to its problems. At last he seems to be doing something. I have been told reliably that before starting the job he talked to former Tory Health Minsters who told him what they had wanted to do but could not because of BMA opposition and a fear of being accused of being out to destroy the NHS. More money, and especially more money for the likes of Dr Melissa Ryan, wont help. We need properly run hospitals, who value their staff and work to recruit, retain, motivate and develop them.

Paying more so even more doctors from overseas apply for the jobs and training our own young people need, will not help anyone. Not least it dilutes existing culture and knowledge. DD recently had hit an impasse when rejecting a referral from a more senior overseas trained doctor in another department. He was unaware of the standard research taught in UK medical schools and so unaware of the normal NHS approach to those symptoms. Consultants in both departments had no problem supporting her. It might have been more difficult had one of the consultants also been new to the NHS. Similarly a Filippino nurse with 22 years experience in the UK told me about an incident involving a doctor from a culture where doctors do not accept questioning from more junior staff. The drug dose was completely wrong and would have killed the patient. In the end the nurse phoned the pharmacy to ask that they insist that this prescription was stopped and revised. And, inevitably, I have heard more than one story about new staff from patriarchal cultures not understanding the more equal status women have here.

The NHS is an industry like any other. Despite what Labour would have you believe.

It’s not a choir of angels.

It is a monopoly, and at more junior levels, a monopsonistic employer.

Other monopolies are subject to scrutiny. The NHS seems increasingly to be run in favour of a small number who have found key positions within the BMA and GMC.

A bright light needs to be shone on it policies and procedures to ensure that the NHS acts in the best interests of patients and taxpayers.

I would start by looking at possible conflicts of interest between members of key BMA and GMC committees and overseas recruitment agencies.

I do get a bit cross when they quote what US doctors get paid as being relevant.

I work in a job where the exact same role pays 30-50% more if i do it in the US than if I do it in London. No one is saying the fact that I could move there and get more means that pay should be matched.

The UK has had a rough few years. We are poorer than we were. We are all earning less relative to the cost of housing/living, than we used to be.

Doctors aren't like a special category of god who deserves to be protected from the worsening UK economy, at the expense of everyone else.

They could, yes, but can you imagine the moaning?

As for "cutting admin posts", @Deathinparadisefan ... would that be actual cutting or redeploying/calling them something else, as they've done recently in our own NHS hospital?

Why would anyone moan? I think it would be hugely popular.

My Trust have an admin recruitment freeze going on. They are also running a MARS scheme with the hope of averting redundancies. Bank and NHSP staff had to be stopped.

As we know, NHS England are ceasing and who knows what jobs there’ll be for the displaced staff?

A bit off topic, but a Labour-voting friend told me when the doctors went on strike under Sunak they were absolutely right to do so - and should have been given much more than they were even asking for, such was the disgraceful treatment of doctors.

I brought this up yesterday and was told that the doctors are wrong, wrong, wrong to strike now.

Ah well, that’s Labour voters for you.

She was almost right. They did need a substantial uplift in pay and they got one. Now they want another one which is unjustified.

Yeah, funny that.

What’s funny about it? It’s entirely logical.

Oh- not everyone. Just those who don’t work in the NHS daily and see the huge issues of recruiting staff who are not able to do the job they are paid to do.
anyway- off point.
All those who work in the NHS deserve pay rises. Our B2’s earn literally pennies above minimum wage- for what they do, admin and on the wards if worth a lot more.
I can only hope that the rest of the NHS also strikes for what we are worth.
You thought we were worth it during COVID, but not now. I worked in ITU during covid- I cared for many, many dying and sick patients for what is in real terms a pittance. These junior doctors, and the rest of us, did this day in and day out. All so you could pay us in claps. Well- they don’t pay the bills.

I just can’t understand how people can argue against a pay restoration. Not a rise, a real terms restoration.

Doctors go through hell, and this is what they get in return?

When the CPI is used, which statisticians consider a more reliable measure of inflation than the RPI being cited by BMA, resident doctors are only 4.7% behind their 2008 pay. That’s much better than many of the taxpayers who are also going through hell and funding them.

Also, given that money is sadly finite, others within the NHS deserve their turn. What about the nurses and auxiliary HCPs who lost out to the resident doctors last year?

These others are really suffering financially with CoL whereas a Senior Registrar makes over £80K. I have no problem with that because they are highly skilled and work very hard. But we aren’t hearing much about that, are we?

Perhaps when doctors actually showed that they cared about the huge numbers of F2s who will have no jobs in August.

The I'm all right Jack attitude is disgusting.

I also agree with @Needmoresleep that a focus on the disconnect between F2 and specialist placements would have been much more useful.

Thinking about it Dr Melissa Ryan's disconnect is also bizarre.

DD is one of a relatively few F1s on the old 2005 contract. Her devolved part of the UK cannot afford the new one, and indeed pay for all staff is a lot lower than the rest of the UK. Staff from overseas often leave quickly because English salaries are higher and terms better. And though they have been offered a pay rise, I don't think it has been implemented yet, as again it can't be afforded.

So Dr Melissa looks to the US for English pay comparisons but not other parts of the UK. But then seems to use old contract F1s as her starting point. English F1s since 2015 have a lot lower loading and less responsibility - possibly to their detriment, so their pay over time is absolutely not comparable regardless of which index is used.

DDs per hour rate when working a 60 hour week is shockingly low, especially when anti-social hours, responsibility and skills are factored in. But it is a two year apprenticeship and she has got through it. Right from the start she believed strikes needed to address working conditions over pay, not just for her but for the overburdened staff around her. Lots of experience is great, but being too tired to learn is not. Nor is it ok for a consultant to feel so burned out with the never ending pressure that they quit. DD would now argue that sorting out the unemployment problem has taken on even greater priority, and there is a good chance her hospital colleagues, both senior and junior, would agree with her. None of them want their Deliveroo to be delivered by a skilled doctor and former colleague whilst they are having to handhold new doctors recently arrived from overseas.

But Dr Melissa Ryan does not care. She just wants more money for a select group of Doctors.

(I love Wes' response. More pay if you give up your generous and expensive pensions.)

This old trope again
Doctors pay tuition fees and work vast amounts of unpaid overtime in their first few years.

They really dont in reality