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?

Did Florence Nightingale ever go on strike and demand more money or fewer hours?

Well hold onto your hats because teachers are likely to strike again soon too. Why should any of them live on the breadline when they’ve trained so hard and do such a great job!
Most other countries value their professionals so much more! Long story short… people wonder why there are retention crisis’ in these fields 🤷🏻‍♀️

Greedy. And this will also create a knock on uplift in pay bands of consultants.

No, it really isn’t. Wannabe doctors apply to medical school. If they get in they study medicine. If they pass they become doctors and work for the NHS (or as GPs).

They don’t rise out of the ground like deities cast upon us.

Lots of applicants don’t get into medical school and go and do biomedical sciences in the hope they can get in to medicine later. Or they become pharmacists.

Aspiring doctors are not rare. Some make it, some don’t. But they don’t do it selflessly. Ultimately it’s an industry like any other. Even if the job is socially valuable.

There are a lot of issues with the NHS & public expectations. Experts warned decades ago that we had an aging population and health & social care was a ticking time bomb. Newsflash - the population had now aged, the bomb's gone off and still politicians are pretending they don't know what the problem is. Older adults often have multiple co-morbidities and their care is very expensive. This is not complicated.

Waiting lists for surgery maybe long because of a lack of consultants but for most common stuff (cataracts, hips, knees) it's more likely to be the lack of theatre space, theatre staff, post-op beds etc. If the hospital is full to the brim with elderly people waiting for social care then elective surgery gets cancelled because there is nowhere for you to go post-op. Ditto for high risk surgery where an ITU or HDU bed is needed post-op - people often stay there longer than needed when ward fit as no ward bed available. If we fixed social care the NHS would be in a much better state. But fundamentally the wheels came off due to our increasingly elderly population and ever increasing public demand.

Why do doctors in training need a 23.7% pension contribution from the NHS /taxpayers early in their careers? Cut the employer pension contribution for younger doctors and pay them a higher salary - if they are still working for the NHS in 10 years time, increase the employer pension contribution. Would that work?

@SpecklyYou think teachers and doctors are on the breadline? None earn minimum wage! All have brilliant scope for earning a lot more. Resident doctors get overtime ffs! None are badly paid. I would suggest too many like the idea of the job but don’t like the challenges of the children or the challenges of the nhs. All of which are known about in advance. What do they all have in common? State employees that hold us all to ransom whilst others pay their taxes to fund them. Whilst I’m commenting, many other professionals have a lengthy training too and won’t earn what a consultant earns! And certainly won’t get the holidays teachers get! Nowhere near!

"but don’t like the challenges of the children or the challenges of the nhs. "

Who effing would? Both sound horrendous.

As for being on the breadline, definitely not, but I can imagine that teachers living somewhere expensive like London don't have an easy time of it.

And the junior doctors of now weren't about in 2008

What's HTH ?

Doesn't everyone realise Medical Doctors that are not being paid properly can go anywhere in the world: America, Australia, Germany, France, the Arab States etc, and probably be paid far more for an easier workload.

Doctors are a very valuable resource and should be paid accordingly. We are losing far too many qualified/part qualified medical practitioners. UK needs to pay according to worldwide standards otherwise the NHS will totally fail. We already see this with dentists who have left the NHS.

Cant agree with the lazy part of this, because it just does not bear out what I have seen. But I do think their position is entitled and selfish - the rest of the NHS has had far, far less than they have. But doctors often seem to see themselves as special and I think this is an offshoot of this. There are massive issues which need to be addressed around training, placements and the ways junior doctors are treated. But I have no time for their strike action.

The thing that people miss is it isn’t just about the salary. It is about the amount of debt they are carrying following 5 years university education. The government should make the education free, as long as you stay in the NHS for 15 years. Then the salaries wouldn’t be a problem.
An FYone starts at £40,000. With a standard three year law degree, you could start at more than that in one of the cities, and it really isn’t life or death doing law. I say that, as that was what I did.

So yes given how hard it is, how clever you have to be, and how exceptionally large their debt will be, they do need to be better paid, or free medical education as long as you stay in the NHS for 15 years.

I honestly don’t know why we let them run up such debt.

I started medical school in 2006 - still a ‘junior’ doctor.

One year my pitiful 1.2% raise put me in the next contribution level of pension contributions, so my pay rise meant I was actually worse off each month.

Doesn't everyone realise Medical Doctors that are not being paid properly can go anywhere in the world: America, Australia, Germany, France, the Arab States etc, and probably be paid far more for an easier workload.

I would imagine you need a good standard of German or French to practice medicine in Germany or France. According to an article in 2023, specialist doctors and consultants in England earn more than those in France.

America pays less, as do France, Germany and many other countries - are residents are relatively well paid for the hours they do.

I would not call them lazy but just because you want a training post, does not mean you should get one.

Interesting to know. I'm still amazed by what I can legally do while operating heavy plant. Like, I can work 15 hours, have a 'reduced' rest period of nine hours (with employer knowing that I'll lose two hours of that commuting before I can even think about cooking/eating/showering/getting dressed in morn etc) and then coming back in and doing another 15 hour shift.

So 30 hours of work with maybe five hours sleep in the middle. Driving vehicles from 32-100 tons in close proximity to workers. Sometimes in the central reservation and having to rejoin by entering fast lane from a standing start. It's insane.

I was surprised to find out that nurses can earn $100k in the US.

It is essentially an apprenticeship until they are fully trained and they should be paid accordingly. Currently they are very highly paid for an apprentice and as students shouldn't scoff at £18 an hour, which is over £5 an hour higher than minimum wage. It shows how entitled they truly are.

Why are they striking for more money and not better conditions and guaranteed career paths? Is it because they haven’t been re-balloted by the BMA?

This is what will destroy the NHS as we know it - and it will not guarantee career pathways for doctors. Golden egg laying goose innit.

Progress begins to be competitive at the end of F2, when the next step is CT1 or ST1, depending on the speciality. Core trainees have another round of competitive interviews but once into ST mode, pay progression is automatic. There is a thing called the Annual Review of Competency Progression (ARCP), but unless you are extremely dim, lazy, mentally ill, or frankly homicidal this should not be a problem.

The BMA's story is that foreigners take all the jobs, and there should be more "training posts" i.e. CT1 or ST1 posts. But 50% of F2s don't apply for one of these, many instead choose to take up a locally employed post, some of whom will later apply for a training post, if they don't go abroad etc. The competition for most training posts is therefore absurdly low - compared with the outside world. For medicine, surgery and general practice last year the competition ratios were 5.3, 8.6 and 4.9.

For salaries by grade:
digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-staff-earnings-estimates/august-2025

I thought the package Streeting was offering included a lot more than just a whopping pay offer. It included training places, better timetables, not having to pay for exams, and there has been mention of looking at fees. But amongst all of this no one says where they think any more money to give more pay is going to come from. The junior doctors have squeezed the maximum the government can afford to pay. They may well deserve more but they will have to wait because we haven’t got it to pay.

Totally agree. Junior doctors are grossly underpaid, their claim is to try and regain what they have lost over the years of pay freezes etc. Many of the doctors trained in the U.K. are leaving to work in New Zealand and Australia where they are paid well and not exploited. We should support them to keep them here to help our ailing NHS. Please support them.

What does the phrase "Resident/Junior" doctors mean?