Absolutely everyone wants the NHS to be better funded, I can’t understand why nobody has put it right (apart from simple corruption and privatisation ambitions).
You want more medical staff in every hospital and health centre in the country? Pay better! More staff means less terrible working conditions, and as soon as that process starts it self-perpetuates.
I knew a junior doctor a few years back, who struggled so hard in their first year on the job (pre-pandemic) that they were planning to emigrate to Australia. Needed to *”see if I hate being a doctor, or just hate being a doctor in the NHS.”*
But not a single word about training. Are we training any doctors? Or nurses, or radiographers? How many? It’s all very well advertising vacancies, and making pay deals, but if the nation’s universities and medical schools aren’t training anyone, then your applications can only come from overseas.
Not remotely surprised.
Pay is awful, you can now work at Sainsbury’s for only £2 less an hour than I got paid as a doctor last year. Isn’t worth the risk, stress, effort and student debt and the working conditions are a whole other story.
(Very pleased for supermarket workers of course)
There’s a certain stripe of politician that sneers at people who believe they have a vocation, and deliberately worsen their pay and conditions on the basis that they will accept anything as part of that vocation.
Doctors, nurses, teachers, firefighters, even police.
Doctors starting salary is modest as with any professional career, but still much higher than the country median. Nevertheless they benefit massively from progression with consultants commonly earning 6 figure salaries. This is just NHS public sector work as well. Doctors have a great opportunity doing private work to supplement the salary which is quite common for them to do as well.
Fund graduate entry medicine you fucks. I’d love to help.
Got a degree in chemistry, a master’s degree in computer science, PGCE, experience working with people.
I’d love to change careers and really help but I can’t afford years on student loans again.
Well yeah.
Imagine training for years to be hounded outside your job every day by some nonce who read on Facebook that
vaccines are made of soy.
Part of the issue here is retention, recently I spoke to someone at a University who trains NHS practitioners. When they asked a recent student cohort about life post qualification 50% were planning to immediately leave the NHS to work privately.
As inflation goes up this problem will only worsen.
This is a clear sign from the market that the pay and conditions are not good enough. Cull management and hire more doctors and other front line staff – and to achieve that you need to improve the pay offer.
Yes, I’ll pay more tax to fund that.
Some of this is simply people don’t want to work in certain parts of the country, and the standardised NHS pay scales means you can’t pay more to attract them.
Wife was invited to apply by a hospital 50 miles away that was in special measures. She was keen to go (commute was not much more in time terms), but they couldn’t cover the extra travel expenses (about £100 per week when she was taking home £1800 a month).
At higher levels you’re trying to get people to move their kids schools etc when as a consultant they basically can’t be sacked where they currently are.
It’s almost as if the pay isn’t enough. Who knew? 🤷♂️
It’s insane that this isn’t getting more coverage. There’s a mass exodus from healthcare right now due to various (probably obvious) factors.
I have medic friends that moved abroad pre pandemic and with hindsight that was a great decision. Many british doctors do this every year but likely more did over the last couple of year too.
There’s nurses and medics nearing retirement or who have slowly been cutting their hours pre-pandemuc who’ve just thrown the towel in due to all the extra work and stress.
Brexit has turned off European workers from coming here and complicated visa statuses for those who remained. It’s put a question mark over their future and caused a lot of undue stress getting confirmation they could still work. When upto a third of NHS workers are from abroad this will be having an impact on shortages too.
There’s masses of sickness again. So when you have the NHS, which has no slack or give to cover illness for staff, lose staffing due to this it puts extra pressure and strain on the clinicians which remain. This further exacerbates itself as people are more likely to go off with stress or not turn up when they know an upcoming shift is going to be awful.
Also the earnings are no where near as good as anyone is putting on here. Plus medicine is self funded and you’re forever paying for insurance or courses or exams or some other BS which is often £1000s.
There’s also the fact that I know colleagues who’ve died or killed themselves. Normally you’d hear maybe one suicide as an astonishing event. Lately, on a family members deanery, they’ve lost at least 3 doctors. It’s absolutely awful. Words don’t do it justice.
So you have shit pay, shit shifts (often 12h plus), no breaks, covering for work where there’s maybe 60-80% staffing cover, trying to do extra work/procedures that are covid adjacent, being attacked by patients and the general public because of BS conspiracy theories, rising cost of living, having to keep up with new evidence and techniques and paying out of pocket for that, being scared to visit friends/family for fear of spreading a deadly virus you picked up at work, with added seasonal winter pressures – why the fuck would you want to do medicine…?
It’s definitely not a result of the anti-foreigner rhetoric of the govt, press, and some political parties.
Long hours resulting in a poor work-life balance, a highly expensive education to precede that – is anybody surprised? Getting into heavy debt to work insane hours isn’t worth it.
Its the end result of deliberately under supplying medics to maintain the earning premium that medics achieve over their lifetime versus all other professions in the UK.
Not surprised as the pay’s shit, you have shitty working conditions with long shifts that you may not even get to leave the workplace for. i.e. being on call and being expected to basically work days in a row, pay for your own food expenses etc…. and being demonised by people like Jermeny Cunt.
I wonder why highly intelligent educated well paid people would choose not to live and work in Scotland? Higher Tax? Nationalism? It’s hard to understand really.
17 comments
Absolutely everyone wants the NHS to be better funded, I can’t understand why nobody has put it right (apart from simple corruption and privatisation ambitions).
You want more medical staff in every hospital and health centre in the country? Pay better! More staff means less terrible working conditions, and as soon as that process starts it self-perpetuates.
I knew a junior doctor a few years back, who struggled so hard in their first year on the job (pre-pandemic) that they were planning to emigrate to Australia. Needed to *”see if I hate being a doctor, or just hate being a doctor in the NHS.”*
But not a single word about training. Are we training any doctors? Or nurses, or radiographers? How many? It’s all very well advertising vacancies, and making pay deals, but if the nation’s universities and medical schools aren’t training anyone, then your applications can only come from overseas.
Not remotely surprised.
Pay is awful, you can now work at Sainsbury’s for only £2 less an hour than I got paid as a doctor last year. Isn’t worth the risk, stress, effort and student debt and the working conditions are a whole other story.
(Very pleased for supermarket workers of course)
There’s a certain stripe of politician that sneers at people who believe they have a vocation, and deliberately worsen their pay and conditions on the basis that they will accept anything as part of that vocation.
Doctors, nurses, teachers, firefighters, even police.
I’m not sure why people here are making the point about this is due to low salaries. Doctors are well paid in the UK.
Source: https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-doctors/pay-doctors
Doctors starting salary is modest as with any professional career, but still much higher than the country median. Nevertheless they benefit massively from progression with consultants commonly earning 6 figure salaries. This is just NHS public sector work as well. Doctors have a great opportunity doing private work to supplement the salary which is quite common for them to do as well.
Fund graduate entry medicine you fucks. I’d love to help.
Got a degree in chemistry, a master’s degree in computer science, PGCE, experience working with people.
I’d love to change careers and really help but I can’t afford years on student loans again.
Well yeah.
Imagine training for years to be hounded outside your job every day by some nonce who read on Facebook that
vaccines are made of soy.
Part of the issue here is retention, recently I spoke to someone at a University who trains NHS practitioners. When they asked a recent student cohort about life post qualification 50% were planning to immediately leave the NHS to work privately.
As inflation goes up this problem will only worsen.
This is a clear sign from the market that the pay and conditions are not good enough. Cull management and hire more doctors and other front line staff – and to achieve that you need to improve the pay offer.
Yes, I’ll pay more tax to fund that.
Some of this is simply people don’t want to work in certain parts of the country, and the standardised NHS pay scales means you can’t pay more to attract them.
Wife was invited to apply by a hospital 50 miles away that was in special measures. She was keen to go (commute was not much more in time terms), but they couldn’t cover the extra travel expenses (about £100 per week when she was taking home £1800 a month).
At higher levels you’re trying to get people to move their kids schools etc when as a consultant they basically can’t be sacked where they currently are.
It’s almost as if the pay isn’t enough. Who knew? 🤷♂️
It’s insane that this isn’t getting more coverage. There’s a mass exodus from healthcare right now due to various (probably obvious) factors.
I have medic friends that moved abroad pre pandemic and with hindsight that was a great decision. Many british doctors do this every year but likely more did over the last couple of year too.
There’s nurses and medics nearing retirement or who have slowly been cutting their hours pre-pandemuc who’ve just thrown the towel in due to all the extra work and stress.
Brexit has turned off European workers from coming here and complicated visa statuses for those who remained. It’s put a question mark over their future and caused a lot of undue stress getting confirmation they could still work. When upto a third of NHS workers are from abroad this will be having an impact on shortages too.
There’s masses of sickness again. So when you have the NHS, which has no slack or give to cover illness for staff, lose staffing due to this it puts extra pressure and strain on the clinicians which remain. This further exacerbates itself as people are more likely to go off with stress or not turn up when they know an upcoming shift is going to be awful.
Also the earnings are no where near as good as anyone is putting on here. Plus medicine is self funded and you’re forever paying for insurance or courses or exams or some other BS which is often £1000s.
There’s also the fact that I know colleagues who’ve died or killed themselves. Normally you’d hear maybe one suicide as an astonishing event. Lately, on a family members deanery, they’ve lost at least 3 doctors. It’s absolutely awful. Words don’t do it justice.
So you have shit pay, shit shifts (often 12h plus), no breaks, covering for work where there’s maybe 60-80% staffing cover, trying to do extra work/procedures that are covid adjacent, being attacked by patients and the general public because of BS conspiracy theories, rising cost of living, having to keep up with new evidence and techniques and paying out of pocket for that, being scared to visit friends/family for fear of spreading a deadly virus you picked up at work, with added seasonal winter pressures – why the fuck would you want to do medicine…?
It’s definitely not a result of the anti-foreigner rhetoric of the govt, press, and some political parties.
Long hours resulting in a poor work-life balance, a highly expensive education to precede that – is anybody surprised? Getting into heavy debt to work insane hours isn’t worth it.
Its the end result of deliberately under supplying medics to maintain the earning premium that medics achieve over their lifetime versus all other professions in the UK.
I suggest you read this. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/869263/The_impact_of_undergraduate_degrees_on_lifetime_earnings_research_report_ifs_dfe.pdf
Not surprised as the pay’s shit, you have shitty working conditions with long shifts that you may not even get to leave the workplace for. i.e. being on call and being expected to basically work days in a row, pay for your own food expenses etc…. and being demonised by people like Jermeny Cunt.
I wonder why highly intelligent educated well paid people would choose not to live and work in Scotland? Higher Tax? Nationalism? It’s hard to understand really.