Even if the man/woman worked a double shift every day they worked, it’d still be impossible to get to £375k in overtime – even basing on a £150k salary, without some form of fraud/collusion that is…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36898881

Or inaccurate reporting

For all the moaning about costs, resources and the rest the NHS really does know how to **** itself with no lube….

Though I assume it’s another case of exceptions vs the rule

That doesn’t sound too unreasonable.

In their article they quote £600 for 4 hours. Typical shift 12-16 hours, means roughly 50 days a year.

Quite possible for a part time consultant to get that.

What option do Trusts currently have? The NHS is facing severe doctor shortages at the moment to the point many services have completely unsafe staffing levels.

If the government made conditions better, paid reasonable salaries, put doctors through training, then there wouldn’t be a supply and demand situation.

@br you are assuming overtime is paid at 1.5 times, as the piece says it could be paid at 3x and/or it could be a fixed payment for a full or partial shift ?

Secondly why shouldn’t a top medical speciaist make £500k ? A private doctor / surgeon could make multiples of that.

These figures will just be those Trusts that have responded truthfully to FOI’s too 8)

In their article they quote £600 for 4 hours. Typical shift 12-16 hours, means roughly 50 days a year.

That’s ‘only’ £120k…

@br you are assuming overtime is paid at 1.5 times, as the piece says it could be paid at 3x and/or it could be a fixed payment for a full or partial shift ?

Nope, just do the sums – we’re talking of payments over and above salary. And I’ve worked in the NHS so well aware of how the hours work and also how crap some of the management is (and also how incestuous it is…).

A typical lawyer charges £300-500 an hour fwiw. Barristers double that

Secondly why shouldn’t a top medical speciaist make £500k ?

Because society cannot afford to pay those wages.

Funny that an austerity enthusiast like yourself also thinks that these wages are realistic. You even fled the country when it meant your own taxes were raised a little to pay for these services.

One of my best mates is a consultant anaesthetist.

He’s often called out to work overtime, there’s a pay structure in place that is rigid and inflexible – indeed, he’s offered to work pro bono knowing full well the financial pressure the NHS is under.

It’s almost as if the powers that be want to torpedo the NHS’s finances by forcing a culture of greed from the top down.

Fortunately there’s an expected £350 million per week due to bolster the coffers.
Phew! That was close!

Though I assume it’s another case of exceptions vs the rule

From the article, that was the highest paid consultant in 2015/2016, who had worked extreme hours due to a shortage of consultants and high demand.

The second highest paid in 2015/2016 got £170,000 less than that – so the top one is clearly an outlier.

The real reason for this piece suddenly being news is revealed here:

The Department of Health in England said it was looking to tackle the issue in England by renegotiating the consultant contract.

It wants to remove the opt-out that allows consultants to refuse to do non-emergency work at weekends.

Ministers blame this for creating a situation where doctors can command high rates for extra shifts.

i.e. it is the opening salvo in the renegotiation of the consultant contracts (since the junior doctor contracts went so well).

Of course, like the junior doctor contracts, this is complete bollocks misdirection and misinformation, because a Freedom of Information request has already revealed that less than 1% (35 out of the 5,661 consultants checked) actually use the weekend opt-out.

Nice if you can get that sort of work

If they are saving lives it seems a very cheap price to pay.

Remind me how much professional footballers are on, footballers who don’t save lives……
(yes, bad comparison I know but nevertheless!)

Payments of about £600 in overtime for a four-hour shift are common – three to four times what consultants get normally – but there was some evidence of payments around the £1,000 mark.

So at best that would be 375 four hour shifts, or 1500hours of overtime. Squeeze 3 overtime shifts in a day and thats 125 twelve hour days of work. I guess you could achieve that as a consultant with part time ‘normal’ hours. Just. Blooming bonkers though. As said above you would hope this is the exception to the rule but good titter material for the chattering classes who want to do down the whole system.

That’s ‘only’ £120k…

Oh yes 😳

You get my drift though…

Because society cannot afford to pay those wages.

Really? So why should top business people be allowed to be paid millions per year (my old finance director boss was on £1.5m + shares etc 10 yrs ago), yet a hospital consultant who can save your life be paid less?

Really? So why should top business people be allowed to be paid millions per year yet a consultant who can save your life be paid less?

Difficult comparison isn’t it though?
A profitable company can pay it’s staff from it’s profits. A government can then tax a company to fund what it spends. What a society can afford is not a simple equation. It’s a very difficult time when we start proposing what people are allowed to earn and probably an end to the NHS.

Wowzers, it would take Wayne Rooney 8-9 days to earn that, and he can KICK A BALL.

Even in the socialist utopia that is the NHS, those who have worked very hard and gained special rare skills can, and should be paid appropriately for them, working lots of hours doing so should earn them lots of money or a pittance to some people. I noticed Kylie Jenner is currently bleating that she’s broke, because she spends $7m a year on parties and private jet flights she’s down to her last $2.5m, bless her – if only she could trim down her lifestyle to that of the consultant in the BBC story, she’d be able to make it last 5 years before she had to make another endorsed Instagram post for a few hundred thousand bucks.

But of course that’s shocking headline in Britain that someone who is actually bloody useful to society makes a lot of money because we hate people who have done better in their careers than us. Unless of course they can knock a football around, then we love them and happily fork over £100+ a month or more to Rupert Murdoch or £65 for a polyester t-shirt to keep them in Pink Bentleys.

Priorities, all to ****.

What a society can afford is not a simple equation.

Especially as you need to factor in all the taxes that will be paid by people who’s lives this consultant has saved.

As said above you would hope this is the exception to the rule but good titter material for the chattering classes

Rates that I am aware of are £125hr for a consultant. £75 for a middle grade, and £35 for a junior.

Then of course the government introduced the cap rate for locums, which was ridiculous and an insult. I cant see a table of this online at the minute, but this has now been altered, as pay levels were too low.

You even fled the country when it meant your own taxes were raised a little to pay for these services.

Yes but now we have the brexit money the NHS is safe in his hands and can afford it 😉
Graham’S nails the real issue – headline ot make us all think they are overpaid and milking our precious NHS

Really? So why should top business people be allowed to be paid millions per year (my old finance director boss was on £1.5m + shares etc 10 yrs ago), yet a hospital consultant who can save your life be paid less?

One assumes, that much like Rooney and the Barrister, they bring in more money from the free market where people can make a choice on whether to buy a Rooney shirt or have their legal problem sorted by the best (supply and demand).
Not everyone who needs healthcare can make these choices.
Fortunately there are wealthy folks like Jamba who use their wealth to support private health care out of their own pockets rather than sponging off the NHS, thusly easing the pressure.
I’m sure that people enter the NHS to save lives and not to make money as a primary reason. There is more to life than money and better measurements of success than financial wealth.

Because society cannot afford to pay those wages.

Of course society can afford to pay those wages. Its just that society chooses not to.

i feel mostly sorry for the consultant in the story (assuming it’s true), he/she didn’t earn that much working 9-5, with weekends off, and 6 weeks holiday a year at a time of their choosing.

i suspect it was in the order of 100 hours/week, with weekends, triple-shifts, christmas, etc.

that’s divorce/breakdown/burnout territory, possibly all 3.

nhs staff are the only people worth this kind of money….imho.

A typical lawyer charges £300-500 an hour fwiw. Barristers double that

Yes but a lawyer’s / Barrister’s hourly rate also recovers significant overheads such as office space, admin support costs etc. The hourly rate for a Locum Doctor doesn’t need to cover any of these and yet the hourly rate is still in that range.

As I understand it, the Doctor’s Union is of the view that anything over than 60 hours a week is very unsafe, so as well as the reported scale of the overtime payments (enough to employ 4-8 additional doctors) the Doctor concerned is very likely to be presenting a clinical risk to his / her patients.

The bit that shocked me is that the BMI has been negotiating a revised deal for a year and it’s still not agreed and ‘may’ be done by the autumn! How much has this cost and what % of NHS staff are covered by the new agreement?

As with anything there are some good questions to ask..
(raised above)
Why is that being asked?
Why is it being asked now?
Who would benefit from this?
Is it actually representative of the real situation or the extremes?

If you ask yourself these questions every time your read on of these maybe we could have a proper discussion about things like pay.

No issue with this. I suspect like GrahamS states this is the start of contract negotiations!

You even fled the country when it meant your own taxes were raised a little to pay for these services.

MSP taxes where raised to pay for Labour’s unwillingness to cut excessive government spending in the wake of the recession. The Tories have ring fenced education and promised a greater increase on the NHS budget than did Labour at the GE. Marginal rate would have gone up 20% plus removal of personal allowance – £10’s thousands extra. As I have posted many times we need a grown up conversation about how to pay for the services we want. In the UK for the average worker tax day is 9th May, in France its 29th July and that doesn’t include the fact that they pay 5% VAT on food and full 19.6% VAT of utility bills.

have ring fenced

just a reminder that is a meaningless bollocks statement, akin to 350 million. It’s used all the time no government spending is ringfenced.

Also a proper groen up conversation about tax doesn’t compare apples and oranges, tax is about the entire economy not just income tax. It should be considered as a whole.

On other threads we have had posts about how our NHS is more “efficient” than others around the world and in Europe. Its not more efficient its providing an inferior service for less money. If we want a quality health service provision we need to pay for it and be honest about what it costs which neither Labour nor Conservatives are doing

Its not more efficient its providing an inferior service for less money.

Got a source for that?

Its not more efficient its providing an inferior service for less money.

You are aware that it is perfectly possible to be providing an inferior service for less money and still be more efficient?

Graham’S nails the real issue – headline ot make us all think they are overpaid and milking our precious NHS

As opposed to all those wonderful managers who do huge amounts of work for a pittance.

If there’s a shortage of consultants can’t we get a few more from overseas? Ooh, sorry that’s a bad thing now isn’t it?

i guess if you keep beating the shit out of the Ts&Cs when the private operators swing in the medical staff will be happy to move over.

As opposed to all those wonderful managers who do huge amounts of work for a pittance

http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/topics/nhs-reform/mythbusters/nhs-managers

In other words, the NHS has a managerial workforce that is one-third the size of that across the economy as a whole.

The NHS in England is a £100 billion-a-year-plus business. It sees 1 million patients every 36 hours, spending nearly £2 billion a week. Aside from the banks, the only companies with a larger turnover in the FTSE 100 are the two global oil giants Shell and BP. If the NHS were a country it would be around the thirtieth largest in the world.

If anything, our analysis seems to suggest that the NHS, particularly given the complexity of health care, is under- rather than over-managed

If you ask yourself these questions every time your read on of these maybe we could have a proper discussion about things like pay.

Not sure if you noticed, but I wasn’t questioning the ‘value’ of the payments, just finding it hard to see how someone could actually generate so much overtime ‘legally’.

ie – did they actually work it, who signed it off (related?), did they call in sick for their statutory hours etc

If we want a quality health service provision we need to pay for it and be honest about what it costs which neither Labour nor Conservatives are doing

The sad thing is that the average member of the public can’t say enough good things about our NHS when they experience it first hand (I’m thinking the experience when there is something proper wrong with you rather than the walk-in A&E experience or the trying to get a gp appointment experience at the ‘light’ end of broken) yet pucker up at the point of voting and like the sound of low taxes. The political parties go for the path of least resistance and promise what the voter thinks they want rather than try to persuade them that more tax might be a good thing. As much as we like to think to the contrary, we don’t live in a particularly benevolent society and until we do the NHS will never be supported financially as much as we really should want it to be.

@br I was meaning in genreal