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?

Is this based on any personal experience or maybe just prejudice?

But intelligence doesn't equal earnings. Roofers can easily earn £70k a year whilst some academics earn half that. It's supply and demand.

Also based on risk. A lot of the ADT operators I work with (50-100 ton dump trucks) are on around £65k for moving earth up and down the haul road all day. I'm convinced I could learn the job in under an hour having driven tippers/mixers before. It's easy as fuck.

It is uncontentious that a broader section of the population is represented now within the medical profession compared with 25 years ago. It would be very surprising if this were not the case, because admission tutors for years applied themselves to the task of achieving this - certainly within the group of medical schools with which I was familiar in the noughties.

They reasoned that academic attainment correlates strongly with socioeconomic status, and if doctors were to be more representative of the population that they serve, which is universally (and uncritically) considered desirable, then new non-academic criteria were needed. In part this was justified by the assumption that lower SES pupils were at an unfair disadvantage during secondary education and if they were just given a chance in tertiary education they would catch up (generally they don't).

UKAT was originally introduced to differentiate between applicants who had reached the ceiling of ability in GCSEs and A levels - which at the time described about 70% of applicants to medicine. But it was rapidly adopted as a way of circumventing the high SES/GCSE/A level "problem". Unsurprisingly in time it proved highly amenable to training, disadvantaging the low SES candidates it was supposed to help. In fact, in a scramble to avoid putting too much weight on attainment the whole process became much more complex, again to the detriment of the people it was supposed to help.

At the top end of ability nothing much has changed but now there is a long academic tail - until that is, academic competition kicks in at the end of F2, and postgraduate exams (+/- research) provide a final filter. If you look at medical staffing numbers at each grade and consider how long each grade stays in post you can see how many entrants never achieve a senior position. The best predictor of ultimate success is academic attainment prior to medical school entry.

The Nuffield Trust gives a headcount for England.

www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/exploring-the-earnings-of-nhs-doctors-in-england-2025-update

@Galadriel
You will also know those drivers will get back problems and also are sedentary at work. It’s not a job many want at the age of 65. Certainly doesn’t have a whacking pension and is often a fairly short term career you do while you can. DH worked as a resident engineer on a big trunk road project and he’d much rather be en engineer!

I don't see how this can be true, to be honest.

A bright 18 year old doesn't select law because they are more intelligent than the bright 18 year old who selects medecine. There's simply no mechanism by which the young people who choose law will en masse be more intelligent than the young people who chose medecine.

Your argument suggests that more intelligent young people will choose to study subjects that involve more critical thinking during training, but that ignores the basic drive to enter medecine to better and save lives.

It also suggests that other professions which require a lot of learning of facts, like engineering, can't possibly attract people of really high intelligence and that is blatantly untrue.

You seem, in fact, to be confusing intelligence with being articulate in arguing a law case, and to be valuing academic ability higher than skills of daily practical value to society because the people delivering them are less articulate.

I'm sorry, but that poster is correct. Medicine is about learning huge amounts of information by rote then regurgitating it for exams. Many doctors however, can't apply this learning to real life situations. They also lack imagination, can't think from the ground up, don't take in extra information given by the patient etc. If someone presents a little bit differently due to genetics or sex they refuse to accept that the person doesn't in fact have whatever illness which is why fobbing off happens so often. They prescribe treatment which relieves the symptoms without looking for the root cause. They lack intellectual curiosity and in many cases lack a simple problem solving approach. These examples are just a few of my observations pulled off the top of my head.

I've worked with them and I've been on the receiving end of them for decades.

What that poster wrote and what you have written does nothing to prove that lawyers are more intelligent than doctors.

I've met intelligent doctors and less intelligent lawyers. Neither profession has a monopoly on either.

There is simply no sensible explanation for why all the very intelligent 18 year olds would end up choosing law and all the less intelligent 18 year olds would choose medecine.

I also disagree that you can write off an entire profession as you have due to your own bad experiences. I've also had some poor experiences but I can still recognise that the vast majority of people receive good care from their doctors when they can access it.

I’m a lawyer and I’m definitely less intelligent than my mate who is a brilliant oncology professor, and I am entirely dim compared to most of the QC’s I’ve worked with. Equally, the last time I used a solicitor for conveyancing they were vacuous and slow, and a couple of the GP’s at our nearest practice are exceptionally obtuse.

Neither profession has entrants with shabby academics at age 18, but it proves nothing, and is not an accurate reflection of their practice at age 35, or 50. The main difference is that the medics will all be paid broadly the same by the NHS whereas the lawyers will be paid according to their performance (or more accurately, the amount they bill).

I'm not trying to claim that lawyers are more intelligent than doctors, what I am saying is that many doctors don't have a particular type of intelligence that's needed in order to practise medicine. I'm also not trying to claim that all doctors are lacking in the upstairs department. I have identified a pattern of behaviour that leaves them prone to being poor practitioners. There are different types of intelligence, the ability to retain and then regurgitate information is merely one type.

Absolutely off tbe top of your head, as you say. No evidence, utter nonsense

Absolutely you only have to look at the news or attend a Coroners Court, to See how good doctors are at shifting the blame. I have said this before, but having worked overseas in health Care, I was shocked by the arrogance and sloppy practice of a lot of NHS doctors.

30 years experience in nursing and almost 60 as a human being. Yeah, sure, no valid observations whatsoever 🙄 I'm also audhd which means I can identify patterns that others can't.

Oh, and you'd better let Wes Streeting know that he's on a fools errand by trying to tackle the inequalities that women face when trying to access healthcare. I'm sure he's spouting 'utter nonsense' as well. Not to mention my dead friend whose GP was too thick to see that anaemia, coupled with a high white cell count might actually mean she had leukaemia. She died due to lack of diagnosis and treatment.

The sooner these useless entities are replaced the better 🙂

I'm not trying to claim that lawyers are more intelligent than doctors

You literally said that a poster who had said exactly that was correct!

There are 188,000 or so doctors in the NHS, can we possibly stop writing the entire profession off as useless? Most of them must be doing an acceptable job most of the time or the NHS wouldn't exist.

Many of them, ime, are doing their level best in a system which is past its sell-by date and calculated to prevent them performing at their best every which way they turn.

@ImdunferLaw is absolutely fundamental to society. As is health. There’s no upper God here. The question of law arises because doctors seem to think they are underpaid when competed to lawyers. The majority of lawyers are not high earners and doctors can earn far more. The KCs and others in commercial law firms are a different breed and have competed with the best to get where they are. Clearly they are not all advocating in court. However those that do at the highest level will be very intelligent. However their skills are not the same as doctors. They would not want to be doctors and vice versa I expect.

Agreed. Just different skillsets and ways of thinking. The Thog Test is a good example of this. Doctors generally can quite easily solve it, lawyers generally struggle.

I'm not sure why you think anything that I've written means that I need this explanation from you? That's all pretty self evident as far as I was concerned.

Can you tell us more about your experience with healthcare overseas and how it compares to the NHS?

It’s on the above 100,000 when you lose your tax free allowance

I worked in hospitals in 2 different countries as a case manager. My job was to partner with the doctor to develop the treatment plan and liaise with outside professionals, families, Courts etc. And to ensure good follow up Care was in place in time for people when they discharged. I met with doctors daily. I was treated like a respected professional colleague who might know in more about a situation than they did. Decisions about care were made collaboratively and I was rarely patronized. Moving back to the UK, I have been talked over, mocked and generally been treated like an idiot. Several doctors have sworn up and down that they have not been given info to try to shift blame - however since
1 keep careful notes, I have always been able to defend my practice. I have also seen doctors from GP practices swear letters had not been sent usually to pretend they had not been told a patient was Suicidal when in fact they ignored letters for weeks. I loved my doctor colleagues, especially in the USA. UK doctors have been an unwelcome surprise. Apologies for random caps, am writing on a tablet.

I'm a consultant.

I ended up in a psychiatric hospital in med school from stress.

Leave them alone. You know idea the dress they're under.

Interesting. Yeah, I haven't had a great experience with NHS doctors although it's got less awful recently, as if some key training has taken place. Or maybe just a younger, less patriarchal and condesending generation are coming through. One or two experiences that were exceptions though and I'm very grateful to those individuals. Fascinating to get an idea of how things work abroad.

@Bones101 It’s true that in all professions the job is underestimated. Some people just are not cut out for a super busy job and like a more sedate job with less pressure. You didn’t handle the stress but working hours are now much shorter and a lot of attention is given to well being. To earn a minimum of £110,000 as a consultant, you have to power on through and most people manage to do that. You will find head teachers, lawyers and finance people have exactly the same levels of workload. They don’t all stay in their professions either.