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?

Meant kindly, but if studying medicine landed you in a psychiatric hospital, it would be reasonable to infer that practising medicine is not the ideal career. There is no shortage of young people with excellent academics wanting to be doctors, even now it supposedly pays better in Starbucks. (Spoiler: it doesn’t).

I can relate too - the night before my first law society final, I became fixated on the idea that I had cheated. I’d been reviewing past papers and worked out the “pattern” of repeat questions, so I rang my tutor at midnight to “confess”. I often wonder if I’d have ended up in psychiatric care if his response hadn’t been “for fucks sake Vin just go to bed”.

Loads of effort is made to protect doctors’ wellbeing in the NHS now - it hasn’t always been the case, but it’s better. In corporate law, I have never worked anywhere where I was not expected to waive my WTD rights on day 1, nor have my working hours ever fallen within those parameters. I often worked 60 hours without sleep as a NQ - it’s part of training for professional life. I couldn’t do it now, nor would I want to, but I learnt a fucktonne about my practice area and it made me more experienced, knowledgeable and credible very rapidly. No antisocial hours or overtime payments either!

Sorry but the protesters really do not know they are born, and their pay demands are laughable.

@Vinvertebrate In every high pressure career, people make the wrong choices. They are not the right fit and leave. Or are asked to leave as they don’t make the grade. Rarely does this happen to doctors but it’s inevitable some are in the wrong career, and that’s often the case with teachers for example.

Yes and I speak from experience. The doctor who nearly cost me my life got nothing more than a mention during a generic briefing and has had no accountability. I imagine it has not even registered to him how his actions have impacted me and my family.

When I grow up I want to be a doctor. Well you know its long hours and the pay is reasonable, but not that good. That's ok, its my calling, I want to help people. Ok, just so you know.

I am a doctor now, I am going on strike as the money and hours are rubbish. Yes but you knew that even before you applied. FFS

Their behavior is appalling - hopefully they will make it law that doctors and nurses cannot strike.

And then they go abroad instead where they get treated much better. FFS, who knew that would happen!

Have you been following the oversupply of resident doctors to consultant training posts?

Yes with a DC in foundation years now (and not striking). It’s the ‘ban them from striking’ ‘they knew what they chose’ ‘who do they think they are’ ‘they’re not that clever anyway’ disdainful rhetoric I’m commenting on. The BMA with its current administration is woeful and asking for more money in this economic climate is way off the pulse. However, we will not keep our best young doctors if they are all tarred with the same brush and are vilified by the public, particularly when their jobs are so public facing. I remember what happened when public opinion turned against investment bankers after the 2007/08 crash. It was ugly. There may be enough oversupply to treat young doctors as cannon fodder but will the ones left be the best is the bigger question.