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?

I do think that if there are no jobs, we need to reduce the number of university placements each year for medicine.
Or have university fees linked to working in the NHS.

They have skills with a global market, pay them the market rate or they'll disappear to Australia, New Zealand or Canada!

Alternatively they'll become like Dentists, become very picky on what NHS work they do.
The UK seems to want to fund the NHS on a shoestring

I do think they should count themselves lucky compared to lots of others
And that public sympathy is running out

Are you willing to work for £15 per hour after years and years of studying and investment in your vocation? Honestly? That's before you start spending money on mandatory annual fees

People in ALL sectors pay for the NHS.

I don’t think doctors are lazy, but I do think people lucky enough to be in well paid jobs, doctors, lawyers, high level civil servants, should at some point recognise doing such a job is a privilege. So much of this country is struggling, and with a number of doctors in my family, I can honestly say they are not. Yes they do a hard job, but they’re well paid and they’re in secure employment with good pensions. It’s time for the strikes to stop.

Not sure it’s just about pay though is it? I thought it was also about qualifying and then not being able to get a job? Or one that you want?

We NEED doctors. Within reason, pay them what they want!

The money is there to pay quadruple time to locum shifts? £90 per hour some get on locum.

Someone once said giving them the pay rise they're asking for would cost 1/3 of the current expenditure associated with strikes.

I think you might find many are not striking. The doctor in my family is not nor many of her colleagues. They think the BMA is not being realistic.

Greedy I'd say. They knew the salary when they started training. Glad I don't need a doctor. If I did I'd be looking for them in the caviar section of Waitrose.

YANBU. Very much so.

They are money-grabbing avaricious entitled me me MEs, always with their grubby little hands out blackmailing the British public, who yes, do pay their wages.

It already costs us over £200k to train these people into a job, often with an almost guarantee of employment (who else gets that ffs?!), loads of choice for where they go and specialise and which will get them earning well into six figures after not that many years, placing them in the top earning few percent.

If they want to earn more, go and work for the big four, or management consultancy or whatever else gives you the big bucks which mean so much to them. Medicine is a vocation and I do not want to be treated by a clinician who is driven by pound signs.

There are over ten applicants, with the required A level grades, for every med school place. Schools need to get better at offering places to better candidates who really feel the vocation, and let those who want kerching kerching most, to follow another career path.

And the BMA offer their OWN staff just 2.75%?!!! They can and should just fuck off.

Government needs to take action NOW to stop these people being able to strike as other professions like the police etc. They need to stop them holding vulnerable scared people to ransom.

I don’t think they’re lazy but I do think they’re tone deaf. They absolutely lost me when I was listening to a junior doctor on the radio who complained that some nurses were earning more than him. Yes, those nurses will have been qualified for absolute years, probably have their masters and helped junior doctors out of many a hole.

DS2 is an advanced nurse practitioner who will be doing extra shifts to help cover for these strikes. He’ll get gain financially but will miss time with his 2yo.

This. I’m a nurse graduating in 2012 and we’ve never had a pay rise in line with inflation properly so we’ve effectively had a pay cut year on year since qualifying. I’ve worked my way up- done a masters, different courses, spent a lot of time and money to get to a senior specialist nurse and our ceiling is so low compared to doctors.
It’s hard looking back at the past and seeing how far wages went compared to now I get that. The doctors I know don’t work any harder than any of my other friends in their various careers tbh. They need to accept the decent offer they had (still better than any teacher or nurses offers) and crack on.

But you will one day and then you will complain that you are not being seen quick enough, you are on a corridor for days in hospital not getting adequate care, no one having time to answer the buzzer if you are really poorly

The money comes from where?

"when the profession is over supplied."

How can this be?

i don’t support them as they are seriously unrealistic about the state of the economy. Everyone is struggling and there are some very bright graduates with excellent qualifications who can’t even get jobs. Training on the job graduate level jobs are far more poorly paid than 20 years ago as we are a poorer country.

We, taxpayers spend over £200,000 training each med student. They should be made to work for the NHS in return, as dentists will be - through a tie-in as Government have announced. And then not allowed to strike.

Junior doctors who go to Aus, NZ Canada etc almost all come back and work back in the NHS after a while. And global competition cuts both ways- securing jobs is not as easy now for uk graduates as it was 10 years ago. They are less attractive than they used to be.

The working conditions are appalling.

Which of these are unskilled?

Warehouse operative?

Carers too. I mean, they're not really unskilled as it takes a lot to care for someone, but they may be considered unskilled in terms of the qualifications required to start doing the job.

However skilled those other jobs are, doctors keep us safe, healthy and alive and should be paid more than most of those other ones.

"they should be made to work for the NHS in return"

Like some kind of indentured workers? It should be in their interests to work for the NHS. If the NHS treated them better, not half as many would want to go to Australia.

Junior doctors asking for pay restoration for a job none of them were doing in 2008. You can say, if I’d been a junior doctor in 2008 I’d have earned this… well you weren’t. You knew what the pay was when you went into it. Sick of it.