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?

Above should read "use more resources" not "is more resources".

I support them 100%. If beneifit claimants can get their benefits increased for doing sod all, all day, every day. Then why cant junior doctors, who work long hours under great stress, get 1. I work for the nhs and believe me, they HAVENT been offered a 28% pay raise. I dont know where you got that from op. A new doctor currently earns around 35k a year. Thats not much when you literally have a persons life in your hands.

Today’s article by Tom Calver in the Sunday Times shows how resident doctors compare against other graduates. I’m not saying they all have the same measure of responsibility it it is one of the measures the BMA uses, comparing with other graduates. It also shows their salary in comparison with doctors in other countries, and against the 2008 stats the BMA love to use. If the strikes weren’t causing the NHS to haemorrhage money it could be invested in the training places, paying exam fees and more in the additional requirements they want
Can the BMA feasibly still claim junior doctors are underpaid?

https://www.thetimes.com/article/895fa55c-65eb-446d-8542-ef5eadfa0158?shareToken=e7e485a1d0484e965ba947562c745484

I attach two screenshots from the article for those who don’t want to click.

That article destroys the BMA’s arguments. There was a similar-ish, but more limited, article in one of the newspapers a few months ago that pointed out that RPI is a misleading index for the BMA to use.

Add in the other stuff that the Times article comments on and I think we have good support for the pp’s astute comment above that junior doctors now seem to want both kudos and the sort of income that less cherished professions like lawyers, actuaries and accountants can receive.

This looks to me like the beginning of the end of respect for medicine as a profession. That’s sad. But they’ve brought it on themselves.

YANBU at all OP. I don’t know anyone IRL who supports them and the medics that I know are absolutely furious at their actions.

@RobinStrikeExactly. Users of the NHs are being punished twice over. Inefficient use of resources and other doctors being really fed up. The IFS has always had medical degrees as the best degree in terms of earnings. Dentistry high up too. Economists third. However economists from lower grade universities can struggle to get better paid work, doctors don’t. Hence they come out top. The doctors who compare themselves to other high earners never factor in that these people have far more competition for the jobs and don’t get overtime and work longer hours without enhancement. The BMA is not the friend of the public who undeniably suffer.

Many, many resident (AKA junior) doctors are not members of the BMA. It’s optional to join or not.

Dentists out earn doctors usually

https://www.lancashire.ac.uk/articles/advice/become-a-dentist#:~:text=What%20is%20a%20dentists%20salary,a%20senior%20role%20(NHS).

Not according to IFS but it’s close. Dentist’s doing all private will but not at a junior level.

I'm not sure how this is relevant? It's a different job in an area that is hugely under supplied.

Many resident doctors, however, will not be able to find a consultancy training place at the end of their base training, there are too many of them. That's one of the things that makes their strike for higher pay even more unreasonable.

Exactly this. I’m a lawyer and I’ve heard the “but top city lawyers are earning £1million in the city” frothing from consultants who quite frankly should be smart enough to know better.

These lawyers do exist, but crucially <1% of all law graduates end up there. For every city partner getting megabucks, there will be 50 solicitors earning £50 to 60k in “normal” non-city jobs, and probably another 30 who never managed to qualify at all and will be earning even less. It’s quite astonishingly arrogant - not to mention statistically impossible - that every single doctor assumes they’d be part of the <1% if they’d graced the law with their presence.

Plus the 1% guys (word chosen deliberately!) don’t have a family life, free time or any guaranteed time off. Been looking forward to that sunny holiday? Tough shit - cancel it. If you’re lucky, take the laptop and set the alarm every day. They have never received overtime, antisocial hours payments or increments of any kind, and often die young in harness. (Ask me how I know!)

There are shit doctors, just like every other profession. Another thing people don’t grasp is that the pay bonanza applies equally to them all. In the private sector, it’s expected that top performers are paid more and that most pay - especially at the higher end - has some level of payment by results. This ludicrous proposed increase - as with all the others gouged by the BMA - would apply to the bright young things working themselves to a frazzle, but also those who crop up in the press on an alarmingly regular basis making terrible and life-limiting diagnostic decisions that cause harm to patients. There seems to be so little quality control in the NHS.

100%
My DH attended two parents' evenings and when working on a big case, booked into an hotel when the DC still had broken nights. I'm sure I've added before that if he had ever been late for Court, or rude to a client, his career would have ended in shreds.

Too few training places, hence the promise, now rescinded.

Imagine after all those years of study and working as F1, F2, F3, F4 etc just not being able to progress in your chosen career

www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/workforce/medical-staffing-in-the-nhs#:~:text=England%20has%20fewer%20doctors%20per,3.42%20Highest

They don't need them. The extra places were a sop to stop them striking, hence why the places have easily been withdrawn.

Even with those training places there would still have been a big over supply, there are more taking medical degrees than we need.

Imagine choosing to take a degree where there is a huge over supply of graduates. It's not difficult, there are plenty of them.

Fewer doctors per capita than any other comparable country as per link above

any other comparable country

United States, Canada and Japan have fewer but they are not shown in your link - all three are G7 countries.

Regardless of whether the doctors were right to strike, it was a mistake to withdraw the training places initially offered. I think it reflected very poorly on Kier and Wes. It is also disingenuous when the 1000 training places were not new places but already existing locally employed doctor places.

What's clear however is that we need to train NOW the doctors the country needs in the future otherwise the population is going to feel the impact of this damaging decision in the decades to come.

There's a shortage of speciality training posts and consultant posts and this problem needs to be addressed urgently. The current rapid expansion of university medical school places without any consideration of a lack of training and consultant posts is a mistake but little is mentioned in the media about that.

An elderly relative was admitted to A&E over this strike period and it was mostly the resident doctors that dealt with him. Although under a consultant, most of the contact with doctors was with the resident doctors who did a fantastic job. When he was admitted, he couldn't bear weight due to a fracture and was very distressed. He has now had an operation and is able to walk again.

I think the dispute with the BMA could have been handled much better otherwise it's patients that will suffer in the long term.

I don't think increasing doctor numbers is as clear as you suggest given the likely impact of AI.

My eye consultant last week said it's reducing the number of doctors his department will need.

I did say we don't need to keep increasing undergraduate medical school places when there is a lack of training opportunities and consultant posts for graduates to progress into. However, we do need to invest in postgraduate training for the numbers that do graduate otherwise we, as patients, won't have doctors when we need them in the future.

AI is going to have an impact, just like it will in all sectors. However, patients are always going to want to see a human and I don't know about you but I want the diagnosis and treatment being made by a doctor, not a machine (AI). Doctors can work with AI but it's poor NHS management if they think once people like your consultant retires, patients are going to be be satisfied with their healthcare decisions being taken by people who are not doctors following directions based on what AI says. AI will be very useful but it should remain a tool. It's not in the interests of patients to take doctors out of the picture.

I don't know about you but I want the diagnosis and treatment being made by a doctor, not a machine

Absolutely not, sorry. I can't wait until properly trained AI that's knows everything that can be known on a subject replaces humans who make the mistakes that all humans make.

I'll give two examples from many that have happened to me in the last 18 months. First, a consultant telling me that I didn't know which part of my body I was bleeding from. Second, a pair of consultants in the same ology. The first explained exactly how MSM works for the disease I'm using it for and said they know it works but can't prescribe it because there are no agreed dose rates. The second, when I told him that I'm taking MSM said "what's MSM?".

Neither of those things would happen with AI. Bring it on.

@Imdunfer re you quote below:
Absolutely not, sorry. I can't wait until properly trained AI that's knows everything that can be known on a subject replaces humans who make the mistakes that all humans make.

"Properly trained AI that knows everything that can be known on a subject" - who will be assessing that? Tech bros? Politicians? NHS managers?

The thing is no matter how well trained AI is, the ultimate decision on whether that treatment is going to be given to you will be decided by a human. I would rather it be doctors working with the benefit of AI rather than celebrate the potential of replacing doctors.

Perhaps in your case it was that particular doctor that is the problem but surely that's not a valid case for doctor replacement. AI, as it is currently, makes mistakes too as you must well know.

I didn't suggest that doctors would disappear altogether, certainly not in the short to medium term. And in that short to medium term, the answers to the questions you pose will be sorted out.

AI is currently a babe in arms compared to what it will be capable of, we are only at the very beginning of this revolution,

@OneMorePiece I went to a conference on AI recently which covered the medical potential: early research suggested that AI not only had greater diagnostic accuracy (which is to be expected) but also that patients had greater confidence in it relative to individual doctors. The ‘bedside manner’ stuff is easy to improve, suspect we’ll all get used to using it very quickly.

Patients want courtesy, to be listened to and receive an accurate diagnosis above all else. From my experience, many doctors think rather too highly of themselves (very 20th century) and struggle to deliver an accurate diagnosis as well. Poor value for money. Where are the sanctions for fobbing patients off? If I'd behaved that way during my career as a nurse I'd have been up in front of the NMC for incompetence, neglect etc.

For all those scoffing about ai making mistakes. Rapid advancements will soon deal with any of this and wait until quantum computing gets fully involved. These overpaid and chronically underperforming practitioners will be consigned to the history books where they belong.