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

To clarify, £14 an hour before tax is the current pay for a foundation year one doctor (ie a newly qualified doctor who has completed a 5 year medical degree) in normal working hours. For full transparency, there’s a 33% increase in pay for hours between 10pm and 7am, and a small extra monthly payment based on the number of weekends worked (these will both vary depending on the job they are in, some specialties do more nights etc than others) but otherwise they get £14 an hour. That’s what PP is alluding to.

There should be people in the NHS who are responsible, for things like checking staff are qualified

It takes real imagination to come up with something as original as that. Well done.

ElliF you sure are confusing me. Those numbers are at the top of the post!!! It says 14/hr for the doctor on the right. I'm not good at math, but those numbers aren't making it to 85k I can tell you that.

I don't even care much about this issue if I'm honest but I'm just invested now cuz I'm mind blown.

I’m using an iPad and I realise MN don’t optimise for modern browsers, so I probably am not seeing the full graphic if you have only 1 picture on the right.
I see a doctor on the left performing a c-section £19.35/hr, a doctor on the right top restarting a heart at £24/hr, and borrow right a doctor after 10 years at £28/hr. from your description of a doctor on the right at £14/hr (£29,120pa) I can only assume the entire graphic is not being displayed in my browser (Safari on the iPad). A lot of older forums do not optimise for browsing on newer devices like iPads. So maybe that’s the issue.

But yes, doctors should be paid more than bin men. If doctors are being paid £29Kpa, some NHS staff are taking the piss out of their colleagues.

The £80K (or thereabouts) figure is a figure that many of the NHS staff on the earlier pages of this thread bandied about. I can only take them at their word, and I have no reason to believe that they were exaggerating their pay for any reason. That’s where that figure came from.

Well, if it were not an issue, we would not keep finding staff who had faked their qualifications, would we. Kudos to the doctors who are brave enough to raise their concerns instead of closing ranks and hiding their concerns for fear of jeapordining their own careers. We need more whistleblowers. They occasionally encourage the NHS clean house.

I don’t see that part of the graphic.
So fresh out of Uni into a £29K a year job, with a 33% uplift for night shift. I’d say for a newly qualified student that’s acceptable provided career progression was not restricted.
TBH, and this is a blanket across the board thing, student debt is the crisis in this country, not starting salaries. £29K is a good starting salary without £30K hanging over your head and a monthly payment.
Its more than Architects get for example.

But if the majority are still on £29K three years in, something is wrong with the NHS.

Ellie do you work some kind of minimum wage job or something?

£14 an hour is not a great salary after 5+ years of study when you are dealing with life/death situations. It's a bit pants.

Senior doctors (inc myself) have been digging out payslips from back in the day. I was horrified to see that my take home pay in 2003-4 was only a couple of hundred more than doctors of an equivalent level today.

I fully support the junior doctors

Well, if it were not an issue, we would not keep finding staff who had faked their qualifications

Go on. There are how many staff in the NHS? And how many have faked their qualifications? There was one fairly high profile case recently, it made the national news but - guess what - it made the national news because it was a rare occurrence, not a common problem.

Try harder.

It’s not a decent salary when you take into account that medical students study for a
minimum of five years, do long placement hours which limits the opportunity to do part time work to fund their studies, so come out with pretty significant debts. You then apply nationally for a job, and although you submit “preferences” you can be sent anywhere in the country. That means that in a lot of cases you end up funding a cross country move, and losing your entire support network. Then you start a job where a wrong decision could, at the extreme, kill a patient and land you in prison. For £14 an hour.

There is the opportunity for progression, which brings an increase in salary, but there are bottle necks at several points in training where the applicants for posts far outweighs the posts available. The number of postgraduate training posts in the UK has remained static for years, and competition is increasing year on year. Ultimately this means people end up taking one or two or three years to work at the same level, for the same pay, before they can proceed up the ladder. Then when you are in training you have to pay out of pocket for mandatory exams, which can be hundreds of pounds a pop. Some of them have a pass rate as low as 30%. If you fail, you get to pay up again.

Conditions during training are also quite poor. Access to IT (needed to request tests, view results, view obs, document in the notes etc etc) is poor. The bare minimum I need to do my job is a functioning computer, a telephone, and a chair. Ideally in an office which gives a level of privacy to discuss sensitive patient matters. Very, very rarely do I have all
of those things. I have also never had access to a locker at work, which may seem a small thing but it means I have to shove my bag and coat in whichever space I can find, which is often a corner of the ward staff room. We get told off for this, as there are frequent thefts, we don’t have another option.

The pay, the working conditions, and the opportunities for progression have decreased dramatically in the ten years since I applied to medical school. I did not think I would be a highly qualified professional making life and death decisions, sat on a bin because there are no chairs, earning less than £20 an hour and spending all my free time doing audits and quality improvement projects so I stand a chance of getting into specialty training.

The trouble is the majority of industries have seen wage stagnation, ever increasing housing & education costs. I'm not sure what the solution is.

It’s comparable to other professions, and you aren’t dealing with life and death situations. You’re shadowing an experienced doctor who is dealing with life and death situations.

lol

You think junior doctors shadow more experienced doctors all the time and don’t deal with anything on their own 😂😂
This is my favourite post from you, it’s genuinely made me laugh x

Have you ever entered any workplace ever or do you get all your info from daytime telly?

Quite amusing watching @ElliF continuing to post….
Just as you think she’s made herself look ridiculous with a new statement, out comes another that’s even worse - I’m cringing on her behalf🤣🤣

Just keep digging that hole for yourself, given me and my ex (NHS) colleagues a few laughs today

Stop the money printing maybe? 15 years of zero interest rates and trillions of pounds printed out of thin air. It’s enough to inflate any economy, but sooner or later the inflated money supply has to be paid back in increased prices. So now we (you and I) pay for our economy’s 15 year free lunch.

No. That was in reference to life and death decisions. I realise they get to look at peoples sprained ankles etc.

Junior doctors are doctors who work autonomously, and make life and death decisions. An A&E trainee on nights isn’t going to be calling the consultant in for every single RTA, heart attack, septic kid etc etc. are they. A trainee dealt with my very sick father - no consultant present. They were superb.

@OnOldOlympus Sounds like your whole organisation is very badly managed to me. Maybe you need better staff running the place. Lockers and chairs are not exactly expensive, nor are they consumables. Sounds like NHS staff are mismanagement their budgets. I’ve said that all along, but the consensus here is that it’s not mismanagement, it’s that they just need more and more money. Like an extra £20Billions would change the way the staff manage the budgets.

A first year doctor is covering the medical wards alone at night. In my hospital that was 8 wards. Yes, they can ask for senior support over the phone but ultimately they are responsible for a lot.e They are not "shadowing". As an F1 I initiated the management for cardiac arrests, treated sepsis and reviewed very unwell patients independently.

Aso doctors don't get an uplift in pay every year as you are suggesting. A doctor on the 8th pay grade may have 12 years of experience as a doctor.

@Haz1313 you see I don’t think that’s acceptable for FY1, which is why conditions need closely looking at alongside pay.

@ElliF Idk what is wrong with the world but you are seriously a part of the problem. I saw an ElliF 2.0 troll on a teachers post too and she was taking the rip like this ElliF. Are these users being paid to troll? Is this gonna end up being a story for the mirror? ... are people just horrible?

Idk how doctors and nurses do it. They gotta fake smile to people like you. Wish I was working in A+E, I'd leave you in the ambulance for hours.

Here’s £4Billions the NHS could have spent on chairs and lockers (or pay packets), and that only one instance. How much of a pay rise could you get is you paid staff with it instead of feeding it into the incinerators for heating?

Thats what, a 10% pay rise for a newly qualified doctor or a nurse?

So that’s what NHS.staff did with the money. Maybe if the NHS dealt with the waste issue they would miraculously find the money for wages or chairs or lockers or whatever the NHS staff think is the most appropriate thing to spend the money on.

@ElliF oh absolutely the massive amounts of
QE has fucked things

I’ve not seen anything about teaching, but my father was a university lecturer, brother is a university lecturer, and BIL is a high school teacher. Father never complained. Brother went to teach abroad (more money) and BIL doesn’t grumble.