To think the junior / resident doctors are greedy, selfish, entitled & lazy?

[SpottyAlpaca]

So the resident doctors are out on strike. Yet again. Patients are being inconvenienced & treatments delayed. Yet again.

They have received a pay rise of 28.9% over that last 3 years, which is by far the highest increase of any group in the public sector. Very few people in the private sector, who ultimately pay the doctors’ salaries, have received anything like as much. Very few of their patients will ever earn as much as a resident doctor. Yet still it’s not enough and they are demanding even more.

Doctors do an important job and deserve to be paid properly for it. But the BMA’s current approach is completely unreasonable and deluded. They talk about “pay restoration’ to 2008 levels but that’s completely unrealistic. The country is poorer now & simply can’t afford it. AIBU to think they should get back to work?

Everyone’s salary has gone down in real terms since 2008. And they are using RPI instead of CPI when doing their calculations. A bit like the govt was doing with the student interest rate. They were given a huge pay rise last year, with another big one this year which I think is fair. They were also guaranteed thousands more training places which they desperately need, the offer of having their exams paid for which I totally support. All of these things are a huge improvement on pre the election. I agree they probably deserve another pay rise next year, but the govt can’t afford more this year and in fact they have said the strikes will cost so much that some of the offered training places will go. Surely that is a disaster for the doctors and for the country! On top of all of this the govt has to find more money for defence, more to help with the costs of increased energy-just imagine how much bigger the NHS energy bill is going to be as a result of the war in Iran! They have got a deservedly good deal, but they should know when the country can’t afford more.

They’ve had one, a very generous pay rise it was too!

@Gonnagetgoingreturnsagain No one expects you too. I guess you perhaps could not be an engineer or an architect either! However the pay rises so far have been generous and the pension is beyond generous. They choose this job and then don’t like it. For your information - architect training is 7 years. To be a chartered engineer, usually a minimum of 7 too. Any esteemed profession is a long training! Doctors get the overtime though and the best pensions and the best return on their degrees. The money spent or wasted by nhs trusts on covering the strikes is £3 billion. What else could we have had for that? Scanners? Better pay for nurses? Even a few new buildings to replace corridors!

I'm happy to take my chances thanks. Considering the treatment I'm currently receiving (none) and the attitude of any doctors I do see (disinterested, arrogant), I don't think it could be any worse. The ai that's currently being trialled in medicine has better diagnostic rates than humans.

I don't want empathy, merely competence and accuracy. I'm not one of these fluffy headed people who needs their hand holding.

@C8H10N4O2 - "... I would say the BMA are deluded but their leadership know exactly what they are doing - they are disproportionately political nepo babies serving their own interests and demonstrably unable to understand data..."

I sometimes wonder if the leadership is a bunch of neo-marxist activists trying to destabilise the NHS

Those aren't the current figures are they?

Aren't you understating their salaries?

Pay scales for resident doctors in England

Having worked in mental health I'm inclined to agree!

When I was at university the medical students I mixed with didn't consider psychiatry a proper career

I don’t think most of them are lazy. When my son’s been in hospital, it’s the junior doctors that are available on the ward and seem to care. Yes, they work long hours and a FY1 earns just over £38,000 but they all knew what the wages were like when they initially started their training.

Isn’t it like any job, where you work long hours for not a massive amount of pay? If you like the job, you’re prepared for sacrifice for a few years because a consultant earns a bloody good wage.

Well you can argue that point but doctors once full qualified can emigrate to places they'd be paid far more avoiding payback of loan or go into private medicine and earn a huge amount so pay it off much quicker than a graduate in something else

I know. It’s very cringe

FFS.
Its not a pay rise... its restoration towards pay SHOULD be had they not be hammered over the last decade or so.
I'm an ANP .. I get paid more than that of those on point 5 ( the top point)
I would not get out of bed for their salary- would you?

I don’t think there is much evidence of empathy given what they’re putting the public through yet again.

Not true. The staff members involved are professionally responsible for their own work

@Paganpentacleit absolutely is a pay rise. Pay restoration is not a thing. Almost any profession you can name has lower pay compared to their status in 2008. The world has changed. We don’t have the money. I agree they deserve more but they will have to get it in stages. All the other NHS staff need pay rises too, and the energy bills will be enormous. They are getting extra training places, their exams paid, and other additional help. It’s a tough job, and I do think that when they get offered a place to train they should sign up to commit to working for the NHS for a fixed number of years in return for a reduction in their fees. We can’t afford to train all these drs for them to avoid paying back their fees by moving abroad. Most people would far rather have home grown drs than overseas ones in our hospitals so maybe some concession on fees could be done. But most of all they have to know that the pay rise they’ve been offered is the maximum the govt have in their coffers to offer. Where else are they going to get it? The 2 child cap is gone, fuel costs are up, and the MPs refuse to vote in favour of any cuts to public spending.

Doctors think they are "special". Well they aren't. They have to live in the same world that we do.

YABU. I support them 100%.

Also the strike isn’t only about pay. It’s about jobs. Do you know how the training placement system works op?

How old are you? Twenty five or fifty five? Two years' experience or thirty?

id bet my mortgage that you don’t have the pressure or life saving decisions to make on your world. My SiL is a doctor at A&E in a deprived northern town. His working conditions and responsibilities are such that I wouldn’t do it for a hold clock.

They’ve just lost the deal they had re training by striking.

They’ve just lost the deal they had re training by striking.

I once asked my son, a doctor, if he'd ever considered working in the UK. He just about fell over laughing at putting up with the conditions UK doctors worked under.

There are two aspects to this.

Jobs.
There can be nothing more frustrating to qualify in the UK, only to find all the jobs have been taken already. Many by those from overseas. How and why the NHS is allowed to recruit before our own medical schools finish qualifying is beyond me.

Money.
They are living in the past. Tony Blair gave Junior Drs as they were called a huge pay increase in 2008. And they keep referring to it. By saying that if they were paid the equivalent now their pay would be xxxx. Except that was then and this is now. Governments cannot give 2008 equivalent pay rises each year.

So I really sympathise on the jobs front. Very much so. Am less sympathetic on the money front.

Media very rarely talk about the jobs aspect. So many think it is only about money. Which it isn’t. But many journalists don’t do detail.

No, and Yes.

Mean annual earnings (Aug 2024 to Aug 2025)
F1: £45,754
F2: £55,383
(CT1-3: £70,942)

No matter what you think about the strike, resident doctors are not lazy. They work insane hours. They have lost pay, like the rest of us, after years of Tory cuts and austerity (one of the most damaging political acts for decades). But so have most people, so I don't have a lot of sympathy now. OTOH, there are staff shortages across the NHS, so we need to pay them, and other health workers, enough to keep them.

It wasn’t a deal they had agreed.