I’m not saying that NHS staff don’t deserve a rise.

But as one of the millions of public sector workers doing “less vital” work and also having pay restraint erode our take home pay, from a starting point below that of a nurse, I’d be a little annoyed if they got preferential treatment over the rest of the public sector.

Love us or loathe us, but if us drones didn’t sort out the taxes coming in first, it’s not just the NHS that would be ****.

Private medicine in any form is not the answer.

Yeah, those GP practices are total carp. Get rid of them entirely.

And the French system, with large scale private sector involvement – must be utterly useless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranking_of_health_systems_in_2000

The elephant in the room is that we need to pay more taxes. significantly more. For example the Netherlands

You mean the Netherlands and their mainly private (for-profit) healthcare? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_health_consumer_index

The netherlands is not mainly ” for profit”

Yes AA – same approach – a board made up of professionals who understand the running of the service with the politicians setting broad aims and budget only

tj: ~60pc over ten years, yes?

For me the question isn’t about the NHS, it’s about long term plans for healthcare regardless of what that takes.

There is in my mind no doubt that private healthcare is going to be a boom town at some point – even if you look at one piece of it like care homes, people are living longer with complex care needs.

That, however you look at it is a savage environment to work in – physically, emotionally, technically… and at the moment the reward is incredibly poor – my view is that the area at the moment is staffed by a lot of people who are doing it because they feel called to it. As the population continues to age you’re going to exhaust the goodwill and supply of these people and have to start to get in others who will have different motivating factors – and money is a big motivating factor for everyone!

There was an excellent presentation at one of the national conferences a while ago – healthcare is becoming unaffordable for the population of the world – not just the NHS.

More funding is needed but so is better efficiency and useful data on cost effectiveness and outcomes of treatments. There are lots of treatments done with not as much regard for effectiveness or cost as there should be…

OOB – that would require knowing the future
Funding to 10% of gdp in as short a time as the service can mange to plan and spend the money effectivly. Takes years to do this.

As for efficiency – the NHS is extremely efficient with very low management costs – or was before the tories introduced their fake market reforms which cost a huge amount to administer

One of the best things the SNP did was remove the worst of the fake market reforms immediatly on getting the ability to do so then left the management structure alone. result is that NHS scotland spends half what NHS england does on management and is able to plan effectivly

There was an excellent presentation at one of the national conferences a while ago – healthcare is becoming unaffordable for the population of the world – not just the NHS.

I think that sums it up. If inflation is 1.5pc and medial inflation is 4pc it doesn’t take Alan Turing to work out that if spending keeps pace with medical inflation before long 100pc of all resources are spent on healthcare.

So compromises need to be made. For whatever reason the decisions that get made by politicians and civil servants WRT health are always deeply unpopular. [1] [2]

The only way to address that is to go 100pc private so people make the judgements that suit them best.

So I might choose to be poorly covered for diseases of extreme old age, in exchange for better cover elsewhere. My mate who keeps sharing demands on FB for ‘life saving’ drugs to be provided an the NHS can pay for that cover at the expense of cover he deems less important.

No matter how well funded it is Health provision will always be rationed. Loads of people don’t like the way the government ration it. They need to be allowed to make their own choices.

[1] Look at todays news. A few years back everyone was up in arms that obscure cancer drugs with little benefit weren’t provided by the NHS. So they spent a fortune providing obscure cancer drugs with little benifit and guess what, people still aren’t happy.

[2] TJ (for example) has zero chance of an extra 60pc funding from the state over 10 years. If he’s paying for his own he can have his 60pc increase tomorrow.

Funding to 10% of gdp in as short a time as the service can mange to plan and spend the money effectivly. Takes years to do this.

GDP growth doesn’t keep pace with medical inflation. So wouldn’t 10pc of GDP would mean a long/medium term real terms reduction?

Consultant pay starts at £75k and tops out at £120k it really isnt that much compared to what similar skilled/educated people earn in other industries.

you do get paid quite well (not that it isn’t deserved in some cases) but it is more than some other skilled/educated people earn. The only way I could expect to ever earn 75k would be to be high up in academia and not in research any more.

Staff nurses after 4 years study and a degree start on £23 000 pa. thats a pour salery for a graduate

I am top of the scale staff nurse and including unsocial hours payments I get around £3i 000 gross pa with very good terms and conditions which probably equates to around £35000 with typical private sector terms and conditions which I find to be a reasonable amount but I carry far more responsibility than most folk with a similar salery would and I take stress that few folk could cope with but that I am trained and skilled to deal with.

Consultant pay starts at £75k and tops out at £120k it really isnt that much compared to what similar skilled/educated people earn in other industries.

Taking into account pensions that means Consultant remuneration is firmly in the top 1% of all earners across all industries. I’d say that’s pretty good for what’s realistically a job for life and one where extra time / overtime is normally paid on top.

It takes huge amounts of study / effort to become a consultant but to say the pay “isn’t that much” is simply untrue, particularly for consultants working in the regions where living costs are lower than the national average.

Staff nurses after 4 years study and a degree start on £23 000 pa

2k more than the where a band 5 starts on the university scale for a similarly educated graduate.

consultants do not usually get overtime payment on top

poah – what as? School teachers are paid rather more IIRC.

A newly qualified staff nurse will be carrying a fair amount of responsibility for that salary – what would the university entrant be doing? Just interested in the comparison

Consultants are also not really in short supply and are a tiny part of the NHS workforce.

Issues with the NHS currently:

Shortage of nurses made worse by the training havinghad the bursary removed and many nurses reaching retirement age ( Me 🙂 )

“bed blocking” because of the failure of community care systems – themselves failing because of inadequate resourcing. At one point 3 years ago 1/4 of all inpatient beds in NHS lothian were filled by people fit for discharge but unable to be discharged because of the lack of community care

Irrational “rationing” of healthcare partly due to political interference. Hard decisions need to be made because healthcare is a virtually unlimited demand. IMO many types of care and treatment should be defunded

Waste ( in england) due to the false market which leads to difficulties in long term planning

Political interference draining time, money and enthusiasm from the staff with constantly changing management setups and targets

Pay is not the answer….

My wife has a chronic condition, she’s what’s called a ‘medicaly aware patient’ as she knows more about her specific condition than her Gp.
When she goes to her Gp for advice shes almost always referred to A&E as the Gp isn’t aware enough of the condition to treat, this clogs up beds at a&e as she’s I’ll but definitely not a medical emergency. But she has to sit there for 2 or three hours while they go through the process of addition to hospital or discharge. She goes hospital on average 3 time a year, we now take an over night bag as a matter of course.

She has a specific consultant for the condition but what is classed as an emergency appointment takes 2 weeks. However If she pays privately, she can see the same consultant tomorrow!!!

The Conservatives seem to want to sell off the NHS so that we pay for it through our taxes and then have to pay 5x more again to actually see any Dr’s with specific training and experience that the NHS pays for.

Labour seen to want to buy votes by increasing wages which isn’t necessarily required.

IMO all Drs and nurses trained in the UK should do a mandatory service in the NHS prior to any privet work. Or they have to pay any loans / bursaries back straight away. Kinda in a similar way to the armed forces.

Private medicine in any form is not the answer.

It’s not the whole answer, but properly used it’s part of it. As a short term measure to deal with waiting lists we hire private sector CT and MR scanners as well as referring to private treatment centers, depending on length of waiting list or how critical a certain exam might be for a patient. Spending a million or so on a new facility when what we need is a scanner to turn up for a couple of weeks to shorten the queue is not the best use of resources.
We can also outsource diagnostic reporting at peak times or when we are short staffed. Again, a short term solution where a short term solution is what’s required.

Privte involvement is not the answer as its ALWAYS more expensive than public provision for the same service

What you describe is a symptom of underresourcing in the NHS. It would be cheaper nd more effective to have those things done by the public service

I have been working around NHS organisations for many years and I see a lot of people working at all levels/depts with unbelievable commitment (I wouldn’t do it for those salary levels) however many years ago (in my 20s) I was moaning at my Engineering team leader about lack of opportunity in my current role – he more or less said “well there is the door if your not happy” so I had a bit of a think looked for a better opportunity and handed my notice in. My blunt position to any one who is not happy in their job is – go and do something else and if money is important or needed find something that pays. If the pay and conditions are that grim people need to move on.

oldman – that s happening hence the staff shortages

School teachers are paid rather more IIRC.

More holidays than God too 😆

Qualified teachers start at about 22.5k these days I think up to about 38 for a classroom teacher after about 10 years assuming all performance management is met every year.

If the pay and conditions are that grim people need to move on.

Have you heard about the massive teacher shortages too?

A newly qualified staff nurse will be carrying a fair amount of responsibility for that salary – what would the university entrant be doing? Just interested in the comparison

depends on what the lab was doing but I was comparing it on the education level not specifically the level of responsibility. The scale above that which is what PhD graduates start at begins at 27k.

My first job out of uni (with an MSc) was 17k which was 2001.

AA – don’t think they’ll be a teacher shortage for long as due to the government cuts, lot’s of redundancies are happening now. Twenty teachers have been given redundancy notices in my boys school and from September Music, Modern Foreign Languages and a couple of other subjects are being dropped from the curriculum in an attempt to save money. There’s £30 million in cuts just in Bristol.

But those cuts are unlikely to come in the shortage subjects like Maths and Science and I would presume unless they cut the length of the school day they will still need almost as many teachers…mind you 6th form contact hours are being cut…a lot.

Back OT – I think all NHS workers would take any kind of pay rise(in real terms) given the significant real terms cuts over the last few years. Add in the hidden extras like extortionate car parking, cuts to subsidised accommodation, spiralling indemnity fees, increased pension contributions and you can see why there’s a recruitment problem.

When Cameron won second time I remember feeling weirdly emotional about the result as I knew that was the end of a service that I trained for 14 years since leaving school to work in. Few years on and that end is closer than most outsiders realise. The NHS runs on the goodwill of the staff. Years of cuts, staff shortages with DANGEROUS staffing and bullying from the government have eroded all that goodwill. Staff are either retiring, emigrating or locuming.

The Conservatives are lying to the electorate – promising “patient safety” a “world class service” a “7 day NHS”, whilst all the while imposing cuts that they know make the service unsafe and will destroy it. The baby boomers are turkeys voting for xmas on this one. Just as they approach the time in their lives when they need the NHS the most, it won’t be there. Still, being forced to sell their homes to pay for someone to care for them should free up the housing market nicely and the Tories and their private healthcare owning mates will be cashing in.

Labours plan for the service looks naive and uncosted. The tories plan is to continue spouting the patient safety 7 day rhetoric whilst underfunding the service into the ground.

Spire healthcare shares look cheap at the moment IMHO. Might buy a few and vote tory 😉

The Conservatives seem to want to sell off the NHS so that we pay for it through our taxes

The issues is that our taxes aren’t enough and higher taxes is an election losing slogan.

Everybody is happy with higher taxes to pay for the NHS. As long as it is someone else’s taxes that are higher. There was a poll done shortly after the NI fiasco. Can’t find it, but when presented with a list of tax rise options everyone almost exclusively wanted to raise the taxes that they didn’t personally pay.

This is what really worries me. At some point it seems there will be an implosion – due to the pressures, the goodwill required is increasing just at the point it is running out.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/29/nhs-nurses-pay-cut-12-per-cent-over-decade

NHS workers will have had their pay cut by 12% by the end of the decade because of a government-imposed wage restraint that is now exacerbating chronic understaffing, new research reveals.

The 625,000 health service staff who earn at least £22,000 will have seen their income fall by 12% between 2010-11 and 2020-21 as a result of years of below-inflation 0% and 1% pay rises eroding their spending power, according to a report by the Health Foundation thinktank

The real-terms drop in pay will hit NHS personnel across the UK who are on band five or above in the service’s pay scales, which includes all 315,000 nurses. The Royal College of Nursing’s 270,000 members are currently being polled on whether they should strike – for the first time in their history – in protest at the government holding down their pay by limiting rises to 1% every year until 2020.