AIBU to agree with Starmer on the doctors' strike?

[Magicisuponus]

AIBU to agree with Keir Starmer regarding the doctors strike?
I get that everyone feels poorer due to the economic climate but for the doctors to strike yet again when everyone is feeling it, NHS waiting lists are huge and doctors are really not the worst hit profession - they have already had pay rises over the past few years.
I’m not sympathetic to the doctors cause in this instance and agree with Starmers decision to put his foot down…

This. We need more doctors and they take years to train. KS should not use training places as a bargaining chip every time he doesn't get his own way. His poor decisions have a direct result on our quality of life in future years.
His instincts are way off - again.

The approach is a bit like a headteacher giving the whole school a detention on a Saturday because one class has misbehaved. It strikes me as totally inappropriate. Surely anything that negatively impacts patients should be avoided from the Government's side?

That doesn’t change the fact that there weren’t/aren’t enough jobs. Even if you remove all the applicants from abroad that still leaves a couple of thousands of junior doctors without jobs. How can you force them to work in the NHS?

Strong disagree. I’m in Scotland. Here the government increased NHS funding - great - but it was entirely swallowed up by inflation busting pay rises. Our hospitals are much worse than in England and there seems to be no concerted effort to improve things. Nothing will get better until wage inflation is addressed.

Being a doctor is a huge commitment, involving many years of intensive study and training.

Do we want really clever, skilled doctors who are trained really well in the U.K.? If so, we do need to pay them more.

Well obviously you would create at least that many new jobs. The point is though that mixing domestic applicants with international applicant numbers completely skews the stats and make it seem that the scale of the issue is much bigger than it actually is. Someone upthread tried to suggest that we were 20 thousand vacancies short which is wrong. I think we need to look at changing visa rules until the problem is completely resolved .

That's true but many, many people would like to be a doctor. It is a highly paid and highly respected career. It also demands a huge level of state investment so in many ways it is a privilege to get to be a doctor. Many super clever people won't get this opportunity.

I have also lost sympathy with the medics. I work in a field where we employ clinical staff and budgets are already set for the next three years. Any pay rises above what the government has offered will mean we will have to lose other staff/posts to balance the budget. There will be no additional money to cover the higher pay rises. We have already lost posts due to the previous pay rises. Including some clinical staff.

Just to be clear though, the number of training posts aren't being cut and there will still be as many doctors as there were. The government had said they would convert 1,000 doctor posts into trainee doctor posts if there were no more strikes and now they won't. Doctors can still occupy those hospital posts, just not as a trainee. They can and do, however, still get trained in their hospitals and eventually (through a fairly complex process, it has to be said), become a Consultant.

Alongside this offer of converting hospital doctor posts to training posts was an additional scheme to actually increase the number of training posts - this is still under discussion.

I'm with Starmer on this one - am surprised he actually seems to be carrying out his promise to not convert the 1,000 posts, but this was made clear at the outset to the BMA, so he is just standing by the agreement he set out with the BMA a while ago.

By giving them training opportunities instead of a series of yearly contract.

I don't have sympathy with the strikers but I can't see how they are affected by removing training places. That will only affect current students (and the rest of us if there aren't enough doctors).

Why? Doctors will all be in the top 5% of earners in the country once they work through the system. 95% of people will never get anywhere close to what they earn. It's greed. Pure greed.

"student doctors" are medical students. After they qualify as doctors, they still face 5-10+ years of training (as Resident doctors (formerly known as junior doctors)). During this training they have to apply for further training places more than once, sometimes every 2 years (e.g. apply for foundation places, then core training, then further speciality training). So lack of training places does affect them. Then after that they are consultants or GPs.
Consultant and GPs are still affected by lack of training doctors because training doctors are an essential part of the team.

(Also, some doctors may be striking out of principle of how the medical profession is being treated, rather than because the changes will directly affect them.)