Get a plumber, electrician, joiner, lawyer, accountant, manager at the top of their field to come and work for you for 24 hours at the last minute when they are the only one available for less than 5 grand (30% of which is probably agency fees due to the fact that the NHS uses staffing agencies despite being a monopoly employer) and this will be a story.
News article is twisted and fabricated to try and portray wages as being higher and propagandising a push against unionised doctors, more at 11
I think the general take away the public will glean from this is “nurses get paid 5,200 if they only had the sense to go to agency, just remember to hate nurses for earning this much and still putting your nans life at danger, you clapped for them and now they’re asking for *this* while getting paid *that*?”
1. The doctor will only see a portion of that money
1. This is what the Tories want as it makes it easier to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of their chums.
Absolute bargain could be your life the doc saves or someone you love.
The doctor shortage could be easily addressed if they increased medical school places and made more pathways to become a doctor, the financial hurdles keep working class people away from medicine via the traditional route.
We’re taking the right steps by making medicine accessible via the apprenticeship route but we need to go further by allowing for physician associates, paramedics, pharmacist etc. opportunities to progress into a junior doctor role (provided they can pass all of the same exams). We’re taking the right steps by giving PAs and pharmacists the right to prescribe soon, as this will alleviate some of the strain on the NHS.
Making it easier for those considering medicine as a second career would also help, as the current graduate entry medicine system is largely just used as a back-up for undergraduates who didn’t make the cut first time around. Giving grants, further support for adult students with families would definitely entice more people to want to change over to medicine.
So let’s fix the nhs today – stop agencies earning more than 12% of the workers wage…. Real simple, overly generous margins and will save the nhs a bundle.
Tories: Underfund and overwork the NHS until it collapses and then we can sell it off to our mates in the private sector and make loads of cash.
What’s that you say? People will die?
Only people too poor to have private medical care so it doesn’t matter.
Agency workers exist because of the lack of full time staff. Lack of full time staff exist because of the low pay. Hospitals can’t commit to higher pay because of low revenue budgets. They then have to spend extra on locum doctors / nurses often at high rates.
This is how it works. Don’t train doctors. Run the service down. Send the foreign ones home. You’re not welcome. Mates run private healthcare and agency companies. Maybe you’re invested too. Maybe a fat job is waiting for you after gov, revolving door style. Crap run down service, under staffed, has no choice but to pay insane agency rates. Cue headlines and the reply I got from my Conservative MP. The NHS is costing record amounts and is receiving record funding. Hmm. Well firstly the huge post war baby boomer generation are getting old and ill. Covid created a huge backlog, and privatisation is splitting up the service into re thousand contracts, which all adds complexity and cost, and of course, locum and agency staff… Crazy prices. Make the problem… Then blame the staff and the organisation so privatisation can be sold as the answer. Don’t fall for it. Vote them out. The NHS used to function. We are supposedly a developed nation.
It’s a patient safety issue. These roles MUST be filled to make sure staffing levels are safe. The bigger story is why we have so few doctors that this is the rate they need to advertise.
In my view this is the nhs’ biggest problem. Burntout staff leave and are drawn back by agency wages. The hospital needs to maintain a safe level of staffing, especially on wards, less so in the community. The trust pays for agency staff – which the price banding is on graded tiers, so 5200k would be a certain tier (for example out of area, last minute, certain speciality). A thousand pounds a day for a nurse isn’t unheard of. Then there is a huge hole in the budget.
The problem then makes it self worse as community teams are understaffed and inpatient staff are either in for a shift, working multiple jobs, and can leave with 5 days notice.
The crazy thing is, if you paid doctors and nurses more the jobs would remain attractive and everyone would have a better time – staff and patients alike.
And you wouldn’t need to pay high agency fees.
But noooo
That’s thanks to IR35 changes. Now everyone has to work through an agency, no longer able to run own business and potentially grow / expand, but rather fill the pockets of the rich.
How much does the agency take for each doctor, I wonder.
Well perhaps if Jeremy hunt had ensured we had enough trained doctors we would not be in this mess.
As Jeremy hunt himself pointed out a couple of months ago. It takes 7 years to train a doctor so you need to manage future need 7 years in advance. I wonder who has in charge of health 7 years ago? Cunt
Yoooo this is crazy. I’d get this amount for possibly a months, even a week at a stretch. But a single shift?? I hope this guy brought people back from the dead.
Seriously though, we need to hire more staff / let foreign health workers in and pay them a fair wage. Simple surely?
Doctors are the top 0.001% academically, study until they are around 28 continuously, at great personal and financial sacrifice, to then work 12 hours a day minimum saving peoples lives everyday, along with a team of dedicated trusted nurses.
The NHS underpays people all around.
Let’s see what the psychopaths that run the utilities companies earn and what they do?.
The Conservative party, who engineered this squeeze, once again reminding us how shit they are.
The Conservative party, who engineered this squeeze, once again reminding us how shit they are.
Bank and locus shift wages being so much better than a standard salary has such a knock on effect. My sister is a nurse, I know a lot of nurses. A lot of them have quit their jobs and gone on to bank because they can get as many shifts as they did before but at a much better rate and with more flexibility. Great for them in this climate.
However it really affects ward running, there’s no team cohesion if it’s just random people dropping in to different wards as and when. Knowing your colleagues and building rapport with them has a lot of influence on your job satisfaction and it means scheduling is a constant daily task of ringing and texting everyone they can in the hopes someone comes in rather than their being stability. If they paid a decent wage less people would be choosing to do these shifts.
This is the big problem for the NHS, the staff get paid shit so they go and be agency workers and do the same job for 3x the pay – or at least the agency bills the NHS for 3x the normal wage
And without the NHS this is the wages you’ll be somehow expected to pay for, out of your own pocket, when all that is available is private healthcare.
Private companies will be charging extortionate fees to maintain the current going rate, and healthcare will just be another luxury of the rich.
If you reckon you can afford that then keep voting for the same fuckers ruining the health service, but if you can’t afford that then voting for them is literally going to kill you one day
They haven’t given any details and £5200 is a very abnormal amount to pay a doctor for a shift. It’s possible this was an over the bank holiday weekend/ Christmas oncall shift where there was staff shortage due to illness etc and they had to sign a waiver on any rights to going over their usual hour limits. If they’re taking on double/ triple the workload, they should expect to be paid double/ triple the amount.
Is it any wonder the NHS is broke management need to Dartmouth staffing and decent wages now paying ridiculous shift payments
I know it’s not the take you’re supposed to get from this article but agencies as a whole need reigning the fuck in.
Parasites.
But they can’t afford to just pay staff a wage they can actually live on 🙃
This right here is why I want a law to be passed to cap all agency fees that are put onto public services.
No agency should be able to charge more than 10-25% of the normal NHS costs.
If a doc usually costs £50 ph then the Agency should only be able to charge £55-60ph and no more. Sadly there is no cap and clinical staff are a premium now so we are seeing absolutely ludicrous rates being paid.
Source: I’m in management and I see what we pay agencies regularly.
Overall, if the NHS salary was meeting inflation and paying a fair wage then we would not have to pay for the agency workers as people would not leave the NHS. We are spending FAR MORE on agency than what it would cost to meet inflation rates.
Tory voters should be banned from the NHS. Why should they receive health care from a service they have actively voted to make worse.
Disgusting. They’ll happily pay this out PER SHIFT but refuse to give the doctors or nurses that as a pay rise per year. Heads must roll for this.
The hospital I work at only let’s nurses do agency from one specific company, which is still associated with the NHS. In my area of work, private agency companies are more associated with providing nursing care in someone’s home.
As a nurse, I earnt take home pay of £312.16 for doing a 12 hour Sunday shift in the NHS recently.
I heard a rumour that a private agency nurse was paid £1000 for caring for someone at home on Christmas Day last year.
I also had a doctor friend who I think earned £1000 for covering our ward as an agency/locum doctor on Saturday/Sunday. But she was doing it to earn money to put towards her exams. Which is kinda depressing.
I wonder which Tory member was kind enough to offer the services of their recruitment agency (probably what happened) 😂
And people are saying the cash strapped NHS needs more money. Yeah.. give ’em all 10%. Clearly £5k a day isn’t enough.
Like I said before – the NHS does not need more money, the NHS needs a massive reform from the ground up.
Consolidate things, modernise, ban agencies – I’m sorry to say but the NHS trusts are run worse than the government at this point.
I am not a doctor, nothing I do is life or death. I am not working in healthcare. I got paid £3K to be available for a few phone calls spread over a weekend.
That was not through an agency either. In the scenario outlined in the article agency fees were on top of the actual pay for the shift, and I am sure a single shift was a bit more involved than attending a few calls. It would have been full time at last 8 hours (more likely 12 hours), and life and death for some poor sods.
Fair enough if the doctor received the money but the agency likely takes a huge chunk. How about abolishing private practice within the NHS? Oh yeah we cant because the whole thing is basically private.
I know someone who worked as a maintenance plumber through an agency in a NHS Hospital. He was on 200 a day and the plumbing company he worked for were charging the NHS for him; 26k for 6 weeks. So roughly 4300 a week. Train and employ people direct in house. No brainer.
37 comments
Get a plumber, electrician, joiner, lawyer, accountant, manager at the top of their field to come and work for you for 24 hours at the last minute when they are the only one available for less than 5 grand (30% of which is probably agency fees due to the fact that the NHS uses staffing agencies despite being a monopoly employer) and this will be a story.
News article is twisted and fabricated to try and portray wages as being higher and propagandising a push against unionised doctors, more at 11
I think the general take away the public will glean from this is “nurses get paid 5,200 if they only had the sense to go to agency, just remember to hate nurses for earning this much and still putting your nans life at danger, you clapped for them and now they’re asking for *this* while getting paid *that*?”
1. The doctor will only see a portion of that money
1. This is what the Tories want as it makes it easier to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of their chums.
Absolute bargain could be your life the doc saves or someone you love.
The doctor shortage could be easily addressed if they increased medical school places and made more pathways to become a doctor, the financial hurdles keep working class people away from medicine via the traditional route.
We’re taking the right steps by making medicine accessible via the apprenticeship route but we need to go further by allowing for physician associates, paramedics, pharmacist etc. opportunities to progress into a junior doctor role (provided they can pass all of the same exams). We’re taking the right steps by giving PAs and pharmacists the right to prescribe soon, as this will alleviate some of the strain on the NHS.
Making it easier for those considering medicine as a second career would also help, as the current graduate entry medicine system is largely just used as a back-up for undergraduates who didn’t make the cut first time around. Giving grants, further support for adult students with families would definitely entice more people to want to change over to medicine.
So let’s fix the nhs today – stop agencies earning more than 12% of the workers wage…. Real simple, overly generous margins and will save the nhs a bundle.
Tories: Underfund and overwork the NHS until it collapses and then we can sell it off to our mates in the private sector and make loads of cash.
What’s that you say? People will die?
Only people too poor to have private medical care so it doesn’t matter.
Agency workers exist because of the lack of full time staff. Lack of full time staff exist because of the low pay. Hospitals can’t commit to higher pay because of low revenue budgets. They then have to spend extra on locum doctors / nurses often at high rates.
This is how it works. Don’t train doctors. Run the service down. Send the foreign ones home. You’re not welcome. Mates run private healthcare and agency companies. Maybe you’re invested too. Maybe a fat job is waiting for you after gov, revolving door style. Crap run down service, under staffed, has no choice but to pay insane agency rates. Cue headlines and the reply I got from my Conservative MP. The NHS is costing record amounts and is receiving record funding. Hmm. Well firstly the huge post war baby boomer generation are getting old and ill. Covid created a huge backlog, and privatisation is splitting up the service into re thousand contracts, which all adds complexity and cost, and of course, locum and agency staff… Crazy prices. Make the problem… Then blame the staff and the organisation so privatisation can be sold as the answer. Don’t fall for it. Vote them out. The NHS used to function. We are supposedly a developed nation.
It’s a patient safety issue. These roles MUST be filled to make sure staffing levels are safe. The bigger story is why we have so few doctors that this is the rate they need to advertise.
In my view this is the nhs’ biggest problem. Burntout staff leave and are drawn back by agency wages. The hospital needs to maintain a safe level of staffing, especially on wards, less so in the community. The trust pays for agency staff – which the price banding is on graded tiers, so 5200k would be a certain tier (for example out of area, last minute, certain speciality). A thousand pounds a day for a nurse isn’t unheard of. Then there is a huge hole in the budget.
The problem then makes it self worse as community teams are understaffed and inpatient staff are either in for a shift, working multiple jobs, and can leave with 5 days notice.
The crazy thing is, if you paid doctors and nurses more the jobs would remain attractive and everyone would have a better time – staff and patients alike.
And you wouldn’t need to pay high agency fees.
But noooo
That’s thanks to IR35 changes. Now everyone has to work through an agency, no longer able to run own business and potentially grow / expand, but rather fill the pockets of the rich.
How much does the agency take for each doctor, I wonder.
Well perhaps if Jeremy hunt had ensured we had enough trained doctors we would not be in this mess.
As Jeremy hunt himself pointed out a couple of months ago. It takes 7 years to train a doctor so you need to manage future need 7 years in advance. I wonder who has in charge of health 7 years ago? Cunt
Yoooo this is crazy. I’d get this amount for possibly a months, even a week at a stretch. But a single shift?? I hope this guy brought people back from the dead.
Seriously though, we need to hire more staff / let foreign health workers in and pay them a fair wage. Simple surely?
Doctors are the top 0.001% academically, study until they are around 28 continuously, at great personal and financial sacrifice, to then work 12 hours a day minimum saving peoples lives everyday, along with a team of dedicated trusted nurses.
The NHS underpays people all around.
Let’s see what the psychopaths that run the utilities companies earn and what they do?.
The Conservative party, who engineered this squeeze, once again reminding us how shit they are.
The Conservative party, who engineered this squeeze, once again reminding us how shit they are.
Bank and locus shift wages being so much better than a standard salary has such a knock on effect. My sister is a nurse, I know a lot of nurses. A lot of them have quit their jobs and gone on to bank because they can get as many shifts as they did before but at a much better rate and with more flexibility. Great for them in this climate.
However it really affects ward running, there’s no team cohesion if it’s just random people dropping in to different wards as and when. Knowing your colleagues and building rapport with them has a lot of influence on your job satisfaction and it means scheduling is a constant daily task of ringing and texting everyone they can in the hopes someone comes in rather than their being stability. If they paid a decent wage less people would be choosing to do these shifts.
This is the big problem for the NHS, the staff get paid shit so they go and be agency workers and do the same job for 3x the pay – or at least the agency bills the NHS for 3x the normal wage
And without the NHS this is the wages you’ll be somehow expected to pay for, out of your own pocket, when all that is available is private healthcare.
Private companies will be charging extortionate fees to maintain the current going rate, and healthcare will just be another luxury of the rich.
If you reckon you can afford that then keep voting for the same fuckers ruining the health service, but if you can’t afford that then voting for them is literally going to kill you one day
They haven’t given any details and £5200 is a very abnormal amount to pay a doctor for a shift. It’s possible this was an over the bank holiday weekend/ Christmas oncall shift where there was staff shortage due to illness etc and they had to sign a waiver on any rights to going over their usual hour limits. If they’re taking on double/ triple the workload, they should expect to be paid double/ triple the amount.
Is it any wonder the NHS is broke management need to Dartmouth staffing and decent wages now paying ridiculous shift payments
I know it’s not the take you’re supposed to get from this article but agencies as a whole need reigning the fuck in.
Parasites.
But they can’t afford to just pay staff a wage they can actually live on 🙃
This right here is why I want a law to be passed to cap all agency fees that are put onto public services.
No agency should be able to charge more than 10-25% of the normal NHS costs.
If a doc usually costs £50 ph then the Agency should only be able to charge £55-60ph and no more. Sadly there is no cap and clinical staff are a premium now so we are seeing absolutely ludicrous rates being paid.
Source: I’m in management and I see what we pay agencies regularly.
Overall, if the NHS salary was meeting inflation and paying a fair wage then we would not have to pay for the agency workers as people would not leave the NHS. We are spending FAR MORE on agency than what it would cost to meet inflation rates.
Tory voters should be banned from the NHS. Why should they receive health care from a service they have actively voted to make worse.
Disgusting. They’ll happily pay this out PER SHIFT but refuse to give the doctors or nurses that as a pay rise per year. Heads must roll for this.
The hospital I work at only let’s nurses do agency from one specific company, which is still associated with the NHS. In my area of work, private agency companies are more associated with providing nursing care in someone’s home.
As a nurse, I earnt take home pay of £312.16 for doing a 12 hour Sunday shift in the NHS recently.
I heard a rumour that a private agency nurse was paid £1000 for caring for someone at home on Christmas Day last year.
I also had a doctor friend who I think earned £1000 for covering our ward as an agency/locum doctor on Saturday/Sunday. But she was doing it to earn money to put towards her exams. Which is kinda depressing.
I wonder which Tory member was kind enough to offer the services of their recruitment agency (probably what happened) 😂
And people are saying the cash strapped NHS needs more money. Yeah.. give ’em all 10%. Clearly £5k a day isn’t enough.
Like I said before – the NHS does not need more money, the NHS needs a massive reform from the ground up.
Consolidate things, modernise, ban agencies – I’m sorry to say but the NHS trusts are run worse than the government at this point.
I am not a doctor, nothing I do is life or death. I am not working in healthcare. I got paid £3K to be available for a few phone calls spread over a weekend.
That was not through an agency either. In the scenario outlined in the article agency fees were on top of the actual pay for the shift, and I am sure a single shift was a bit more involved than attending a few calls. It would have been full time at last 8 hours (more likely 12 hours), and life and death for some poor sods.
Fair enough if the doctor received the money but the agency likely takes a huge chunk. How about abolishing private practice within the NHS? Oh yeah we cant because the whole thing is basically private.
I know someone who worked as a maintenance plumber through an agency in a NHS Hospital. He was on 200 a day and the plumbing company he worked for were charging the NHS for him; 26k for 6 weeks. So roughly 4300 a week. Train and employ people direct in house. No brainer.