How much do you think doctors actually get paid?

[Hayley37888]

I find it ridiculous for their level of skills. No wonder they’re leaving for Australia / New Zealand

@ElliF

We are, I have 3 degrees including medicine and moved to a different industry all together, no nights or weekends, no complaints, and almost double the money.

I had ten years UK clinical experience including quite niche work in rare diseases, nobody has replaced me and the waiting lists continue to grow.

So yes, we are highly qualified professionals and we are leaving in droves. Doesn’t help the NHS crisis though does it?

My medic sons year are all heading to Oz for better terms and conditions and I don't blame them. Crippling student loans, terrible hours here and such a better overall work life balance . His younger siblings already outearn him here

Consultants are paid a lot our on call psychiatrist is paid £150k per year we have 5 patients on site . I would have definitely gone into psychiatry if I could go back to my school days

Taking it to hourly rates is very misleading. The problem isn't Drs do not not get paid enough in their annual salary. The problem is they work too many hours for that salary - which is probably not safe either, I don't want a Dr that is exhausted after working excessive hours to make life changing decisions for me!

This is what drives me nuts on all the strikes for salary. Dr, teachers, nurses salaries are ok. It is the hours and conditions that are the real problems that need resolved!

It's easy to jump on the bandwagon of GP salaries and part time work but it's junior doctors at the start of their careers that are badly paid.
yes the baseline pay isn't what they get because of unsocial hours and yes they have a good pension. But the starting pay after 5 years of training is £29384. Pension contributions are 9.3%.

My DS has a friend the same age who has just qualified and started as a F1 and he earns £20k less than DS earns in tech. Said friend has a job lined up in a med tech firm so that's another doctor lost to the NHS.

All the cost to the taxpayer of training these doctors down the drain for the sake of paying them a decent salary. The tuition fees don't cover the cost, it's heavily subsidised and that's one reason why training places are limited.

You want the best doctors? You need to attract the brightest students. What else attracts the brightest students is the financial sector (alongside other highly paid sectors). The grade requirements for both are broadly similar so I would say it is the perfect comparison. On the other hand, you cannot compare medicine to a minimum wage role where the employees often have masters degrees in completely unrelated subjects and no professional qualification or ongoing professional development. I would love to know one country where the salary of a medic is used as a base for comparison to a minimum wage role.

I know several medics who chose between the two when deciding on their degree (and with the benefit of hindsight wish they had chosen the other). I also know 2 who have moved into the financial sector after working for a few years as a junior doctor.

That can't be true? I though a consultant or gp was on near 90-150k full time?

At 15ph I was earning 35k a year in IT.

They don't do bad

It’s true.

Consultants are on decent money, but not as much as 150k. And that’s only after years and years of training, being used as service provision, and sitting extremely hard postgraduate exams. The responsibility they shoulder in return for that pay is enormous.

The doctors you will see day to day in hospital (ie delivering your baby, taking out your appendix, reviewing you in A&E) are mostly “junior” doctors on the figures quoted in the OP.

Junior doctor pay scale: www.bma.org.uk/pay-and-contracts/pay/junior-doctors-pay-scales/pay-scales-for-junior-doctors-in-england

Consultant pay scale:
www.bma.org.uk/pay-and-contracts/pay/consultants-pay-scales/pay-scales-for-consultants-in-england

It’s slightly different again for GPs, they aren’t paid on these pay scales.

So they have close on a decade to decide if they want the job knowing the pay that comes with it. Where’s the problem? Why all the whining? And the bottom line is they end up some of the richest people in the world. Top 2% of all people on earth. They have the highest and most privileged lifestyles this country has to off.

Oh, the struggles of the wealthy classes. They’ll be complaining about private school fees and the cost to charge their Tesla’s next.

There’s that reverse snobbery I was talking about.

The end salary isn’t gonna pay their bills. I think our government are about to lose a generation of doctors and investment

I’m surprised people suggest £80k is too much because many other jobs earn much less.

It’s not a race to the bottom and is about rewarding people for the skill they bring. Being a Doctor involves long training (and therefore debt) and high levels of skill and qualification that the vast majority of the population don’t have. So they need to financially rewarded for it. It’s how wages work.

If we want quality people to be our Doctors, we have to pay them. Otherwise, these people won’t choose medicine, they will go into the city and do other things.

It’s daft begrudging them their wages because they are higher than most workers. Of course Doctors earn more than most. And of course they should.

Think about whether you want more GPS to leave. Think about if you want to be treated in hospital if you’re ill. If we don’t pay them enough we will all lose out.

@gogohmm the point is that the kids who are choosing medicine today will be as bright or brighter than those choosing degrees leading them to the finance and economics big bucks. It's just that the medic ones are a bit less materialistic and more altruistic. You could also argue that finance and economics employees are hardly handling life or death situations.

They’ll just hire them from abroad.

“In the name of our profession, our patients, and our NHS, doctors won’t take it anymore”

It’s go time!

Well, there’s Deliveroo and Uber, but my guess is you get paid more by the NHS. Have a wee break then go back to work. I’m guessing you can’t live on strike pay.

They aren't paid enough, however that information is very deceiving. Most doctors earn a lot more than that, get additional monies for oncalls/ additional PAS etc and then consultants have their own pay scales.

Wow, those stats say it all. 77.5% turnout and over 98% voting yes... you don't get much more decisive than that.

I'm seriously concerned about the impact of these strikes, but I'm even more concerned about the unsustainable expectations on our junior doctors (and other healthcare professionals) who do such an incredibly difficult job in increasingly impossible circumstances. I'm behind them 100% and I sincerely hope that this morally bankrupt government will finally be forced to listen and take action.

Yes, there are different jobs.

What a bizarre comparison.

I wouldn’t bother responding to be honest. She’s not posting in good faith, why reply in good faith?

The focus is always on hourly pay but what is never discussed is the amazing pension, maternity and sick pay vs private sector. Maybe this should be stripped back and given back directly in pay

It wasn’t a comparison. It’s was a suggestion of easy and quick jobs they can do in order to try to stay on strike. If they can’t live on strike pay they’ll be back at work to put food on the table. People will always surrender their principles in exchange for food and comfort. We’ve know this for hundreds of years.

Strikes are merely a PR exercise for Governments. They need to balance public opinion and disruption against further damaging the economy by printing money.

Of course if management weren’t paid hundreds of thousands of points and managed their £180Billion budget, maybe people would get paid more. Of course no one is willing to look at where the money is actually going, are they?

My money is on them returning to work when they get hungry, rather than finding alternative incomes and sticking by their principles. All the Government needs to do is give them a way back that makes it look like they haven’t just given in. So we’ll play the ‘in service to the public’ and ‘the public need us’ mantras and just roll over on maybe 4%.

I say manage the NHS properly and stop pissing the money up the wall. Have a real public enquiry as to where the NHS is spending its money.

Which “abroad” @ElliF ? The countries that doctors are going to because they get paid so much more there? Why would those doctors come here then?

Or the countries that are lesser economically developed? I know you are very concerned about the nasty wealthy doctors stealing money from the poor, so I’m sure you don’t mean we poach doctors from these countries do you?

We need a public enquiry into the funding of the NHS. Even the doctors cannot explain why it costs £180Billion a year to run.