PAY THE NHS & SOCIAL CARE PEOPLE A DECENT WAGE

Thing is Helen, as much as I want them to feel valued too ( I really do) but I would like my really good friend to live to see it happen too!

 

So would I and I truly hope they get their operation ASAP. However, we lose doctors and there is the risk that other folk will never get treated.

 

Junior doctors get paid badly considering the hours they work and the responsibility that they have. They deserve a big pay rise and I fully support their actions, you will never get people to join the profession if the pay is crap, pay them a fair wage and people will want to be part of that profession. It was only a few years ago that these Tory two hats were encouraging people to clap for carers, hypocritical twunts

 

I completely agree, Brush! We all clapped them because they were/are heroes who saved lives by putting their own lives at significant risk of death whilst wearing either inadequate or no protective clothing.
The sad thing is that some of us knew that this would be “forgotten” by the Tory liars standing behind a lectern of on their doorsteps clapping (all filmed in glorious technicolour.
They saved lives! They will continue to save lives. Treat them with respect that they deserve & give them the money instead of your rich friends

 

There have been many unrealistic things in recent years - pub landlords providing PPE, illegal gatherings (not parties or “cake”), missing billions (test & trace, for example), 126 fines for criminality in 10 Downing St (including 2 of our last 3 PMs) - paying lifesaving heroes who risked their very lives for us in face of an unknown virus what they are worth (£20 per hour for gods sake) is not an unrealistic thing. Justify it all you like, talk about differing pay grades for qualified doctors, but at the end of the day, it will never be unrealistic

 

Have to declare a vested interest here, my son is coming to the end of his 4th year of 6 studying medicine at the University of Birmingham Medical School. He's a working class kid, with working class parents who both work in the NHS too. His younger sister starts studying Children's Nursing in September too. He has over £50,000 of student debt already, it'll likely exceed £80k by the time he graduates. He has the chance of a overseas elective placement next year, as do many of his peers across the country. It goes without saying that there are apparently record numbers wanting to sample Australia and New Zealand.

Annual NHS budget approx £153 billion.
One off cost to restore junior doctor pay to 2008 levels is approx £2 billion.
£56 billion wasted or written off in the last 3 years by the Government on Test and Trace, inadequate PPE and Covid tests, and given to companies with no healthcare track record or with links to Tory party members (and in some cases both). The German equivalent of Test and Trace cost a third of ours.

It's about choice at political level. Be in no doubt what our Government have chosen.

 

Did you know that the term Junior Doctor applies to other people than just newly qualified doctors?

I only ask because I didn't realise. There are doctors that have been working for 20 years that are still classed as "Junior Doctor"

 

No, supertyke didn't know the difference, he's either a wind up merchant or living in Johnson's underpants and has a life time subscription to the daily fail and only watches GB news and listens to piers Morgan's podcasts

 

Yes. As I understand it it's basically any doctor who hasn't become a consultant (I think) which is what makes the 35% demands worse imo because we aren't just talking about someone on £14 an hour wanting an extra 35% overnight. We are talking about people on much more than that too.

I've nothing against doctors at all. But 35% is just so crazy it stops negotiations before they start.

 

They aren’t asking for a pay rise. They are asking for pay restoration in line with inflation for money lost in the last 13 years. £19 per hour as a doctor is completely reasonable. You can get a job at my local Aldi that’s the same as some junior doctors left. If we can find 37billion to give to corrupt tories we can find this.

At the minute the health service can’t retain staff. The only way to change that is pay them more competitively. Australia starting salary is 60k. We need to look to compete with that. On a daily basis my missis a band 6 nurse gets contacted by overseas recruitment agencies trying to lure her to take posts overseas that would see a 20k increase in salary. Doctors are the same.

 

As someone who used to work in the NHS, the thing that's barmy about all this is that no hospital anywhere in the country can recruit the numbers of junior doctors (and many other clinical staff groups) they need and so end up paying far more to private staff agencies who have them over a barrel when a shift needs to be filled. Over £3 billion was paid to agencies in 2021/22 and the agencies make huge profits.

The Government allowing the NHS to implement a more realistic salary structure and the type of flexible working conditions that are commonplace in other countries would enable it to recruit to fill more posts substantively and to retain more of its existing staff, thus significantly reducing the need for expensive agency staff. The business case and financials pretty much write themselves.

As others have said this isn't really about the public purse having to cough up huge sums as a lot of what would be needed is already being spent inefficiently propping up the current overstretched system with hyper-expensive last minute (and often safety questionable) sticking plasters.

It's about political ideology.

Unfortunately a lot of the agencies have owners and/or friends in the Tory Party - examples of which include one of the main suppliers of agency doctors to the NHS, Medacs, which is intrinsically linked to Lord Ashcroft for example, and which trousered a cool £350m of the Track and Trace Fraud-fest for itself as well.

 

We could have had the German system (which actually works) for ONE MILLION POUNDS but instead we gave Dido Harding £37 BILLION and got a bag of ****.

 

It's funny how the Tory Party, the self appointed "Party of Business", has no idea how financial negotiations work. It's almost as if they've no interest in them. Weird huh?

 

No one ever asks the question - you have been running with over 100k vacancies for several years. I assume the money not spent on those salaries has been ringfenced so assume Government has a fund that it is not spending that could be used to fund these increases to reward retention and loyalty.

If there’s no money to pay current staff correctly then what happens if the NHS manages to recruit the 126k missing employees?

Reality is that money has been siphoned off to Tory donors via agency staff

 

It isn't greed at all, they used to be paid that amount but it has slowly been whittled away by inflation lower "increases". All they are asking for is to be put back to the same level they used to be on.

 

Surely at the end of the day this is a societal issue where we either say we will fund the NHS or we wont. It is so glaringly apparent that the Tories believe its best to let it decline that I still can't believe working class folk vote for them. Fund the NHS properly so it functions and if that means restructuring taxation and/or priorities then do so.

 

well if these bar stewards in charge of the country for the last13 years hadn't cut public pay so much, they wouldn't be asking for these type of pay rises now.
everything's relative, pay people what they are worth.you could argue that MPs don't deserve such high wages as they don't save lives. the (wy just fek most of the populations lives up... (well the tories do anyway...)