Those who think that work in the private sector is as hard as working in medicine, genuinely don’t have a clue. My private sector job is well paid and stressful, but when I compare my issues at work to those of my partner (who is a dr), it makes me ashamed to think that I’m stressing over what are really inconsequential issues in the grand scheme of things.

There is a level of arrogance associated with just assuming because you are a doctor you can walk into others professions because they are ‘easy’.

No not at all. It’s a decision made a lot of the time at GCSEs to give their life to a vocation. Mrs FD knows she couldn’t do another job now, but she does know that she couldn’t have chosen career paths that would have allowed her to earn considerably more money. Money isn’t the main driver for Mrs FD but when she started in that career journey , consultants still earned similar money to high performers in other industries

I think if doctors were serious about sorting care they would be saying, nope don’t give us large payrises, use the funding to ensure medicine is free to study

Again although pay is not the ultimate driver for many consultants , pay shit wages and you won’t get people to do the job.

Mrs FD tells multiple people a week that their life is going to be cut short. She then tells them she can cut their leg off to extend their life a little longer . She will then operate on someone and cut their tumour out and take the leg off, making the decision to cut enough leg off to catch the tumour but not take too much leg off, the or cut the wrong bit of anatomy making them bleed to death .

I’ve passed through one of her clinic waiting rooms seeing some of the people waiting. I wouldn’t have the ability to even tell them they are going to die then let alone operate on them .

IMO that type of work should be valued in society and paid accordingly. They are exceptional people doing an exceptional job, it’s not a race to the bottom

OR we could just keep conditions the same, increase the packages of doctors more, so they can moan about the tax they pay and go part time or retire.

At least try and understand the situation rather than respond in a way that shows complete lack of understanding or just pure financial jealousy

My cousin is a similar high achiever. He looked at medicine when he was young, but blood wasn’t a thing he could handle. Very similar background to Mrs FD ie state school. He went down an ICI graduate route after getting a first at Oxford . He’s now retired mid 50’s and a multi millionaire . He talks quite a lot to Mrs FD about their work paths. He’s always said his path was the easier one

There is a level of arrogance associated with just assuming because you are a doctor you can walk into others professions because they are ‘easy’.  

Where has that assumption been made?

I was with you till that bit.  It is not shit pay.

it is shit compared to what they can earn in comparable industries and people of similar calibre (again it’s not a race to the bottom)

Not one doctor will argue they are on poor salary value when you compare it to the national avg, although I think many probably fall below the avg when you work out an hourly rate for hours worked.

The fact is they are not average people, they are more qualified, trained and skilled than most, but don’t get paid accordingly

I agree this could end up going no where

The arguement if different decisions were made many years / decades ago for a different career choice is a not a logical one, I can’t see how clever people keep trotting it out.

The best people coming through are now deciding not to become doctors as pay and the NHS is so bad. Paying them more towards the avg pay would make it even worse.

There have been many post above about Uk trainees going to work abroad , as I posted above my wife can’t recruit to a prestigious consultant job with a UK trainee .

Mrs FD was offered a 7 figure salary to go and wrk in Canada for less hours, more pleasent environment. If it wasn’t for family reasons we would have been off like a shot.

This isn’t about the existing workforce it’s about attracting the best future workforce. You don’t get the best paying avg wages.

Now if you want someone to make a decision based on Google or a hunch then we can go down the average person. Let’s hope you don’t end up dead

personally I know I’m not intelligent enough or committed enough to be a doc therefore I don’t expect to earn the same money as one

Same with most folk in the NHS

agree, I think this is something really badly effecting NHS management. Good people earn more privately , so on the whole the NHS is run by mediocre managers

my sister (a solicitor), my brother-in-law (engineering firm executive), and my brother and sister-in-law (management consultants) …all get paid more than me, some of them considerably so

Solicitor average salary = £62k in 2018 so probably £80k now but significantly less outside London

https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/career-advice/becoming-a-solicitor/how-much-do-solicitors-earn

Engineering firm executive – engineering is not well paid in the UK, average for senior engineer is £50k-60k or thereabouts depending on the branch and experience level

Management consultant is very broad but the below puts the top end of the senior bracket at £80k

https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/management-consultant#salary

These all seem lower than GP pay to me, as well as being less rewarding and far less secure with much worse pension provision.

Is it the case that your family members have moved above these roles into management positions, which for a fair comparison you’d need to compare with NHS management positions?

You should try working in a private hospital. You would come to a different conclusion once you had heard them talking about what drives them.

I would agree with that , there are a sub group of surgeons who start medical school with the only objective of doing private practice and earning big money.

They are not the majority though

I think most doctors rightly expect to be well paid.  I don’t begrudge them this.    I could have gone to medical school but I knew I did not want to work that hard.  🙂

I am sure I will be corrected if I am wrong but have we not seen huge inflation in doctors salaries outside the UK?  Also the types of jobs compared to above have also done very well in recent years have they not?

Mrs FD was offered a 7 figure salary to go and wrk in Canada for less hours, more pleasent environment. If it wasn’t for family reasons we would have been off like a shot.

I know a few people (some docs, some other professions) who have been in similar positions – the simple fact that even massive salaries don’t tempt alot of people to upend their world tells you that earnings is not the simple motivator here and throwing money to compete with other opportunities might just be “spending money we don’t need to” and diverting money from fixing the real problems which actually make people leave (like overwork, poor support etc).  My brother got offered the chance to move to Ireland for double his (very healthy) NHS salary… and despite having no family issues that would have stopped him he turned it down because “the work didn’t look as interesting (he does a lot of research stuff just now)”.

agree, I think this is something really badly effecting NHS management. Good people earn more privately , so on the whole the NHS is run by mediocre managers

I might suggest that part of that problem is the public view that we (the country) spend too much on management and the money should all go to Drs and Nurses.  Its probably a false economy which in at least some cases will be made worse by the belief that “dr’s are more intelligent and committed than ordinary people” (to slightly paraphrase your post).

My cousin is a similar high achiever. He looked at medicine when he was young, but blood wasn’t a thing he could handle. Very similar background to Mrs FD ie state school. He went down an ICI graduate route after getting a first at Oxford . He’s now retired mid 50’s and a multi millionaire . He talks quite a lot to Mrs FD about their work paths. He’s always said his path was the easier one

Do you think that everyone who joined the ICI graduate programme became a multi-millionaire?  Does your wife regret her life choices?  Thats not to say would she like to be a multimillionaire and have the freedom to retire at mid 50’s – but does she think “I made a huge mistake, I wish I could go back”.  Does she ever wonder if to get to that level of financial success she might have needed to make some horrible decisions or take advantage of situations that might not have fitted with the mindset which presumably drove her to be a surgeon and helping people?

Add in the fact that the stress in medicine is due to effectively playing god with people’s lives

For those of you who think good managers in private companies have it easy and nothing is that important think again. We are also often playing God with peoples lives. The way we treat people has a significant affect on their health, managing redundancies and performance can be life or death, I can think of at least 3 people who have committed suicide after losing their jobs, thankfully in those cases it was not me taking their livelihood and self worth away. And then there’s chronic sickness and mental health issues we have to deal with on a daily basis, something very few of us if any have had any training to deal with, issues that are getting worse because of the state of the NHS. Then there’s knock on affect of having to support the people who do actually make it into work who try to pick up the slack of the people off sick.

And that’s all on top of the often extremely stressful day job of making the technicalities of the business work. Stress is relative, being screamed at and bullied via corporate culture is very real and very serious, and those of us that try to do our jobs well do care a lot about what we do and how we do it. Taking your responsibilities seriously as a manger is hard when you have everyone else expecting you to make the right call and sort things out, that’s why managers get paid more. How many of the teachers on here have said they moved to management grades but then moved back to a core teaching role. Being a good manager isn’t something everyone can do. It can also be pretty technical for those at the top if they understand their businesses properly, it’s not all surfing meetings and golf.

Conversely being a GP isn’t life threatening situation after life threatening situation, there’s loads of mundane appointments and worried well in between.

As said before trying to compare the difficulty or worth of roles isn’t helpful, and critically it’s not how our system works. So unless there’s a wholesale change in the way our society coming (spoiler alert there is not) not much will change.

I wonder how much of the negativity (justified or not) coming from people already in the NHS puts off potential new recruits.

stumpyjon

Thats a lot of stress for sure but its different.  Having had a taste of both types of stress there is a qualitative difference.  I do not deny that what you are describing can take its toll as well ( it did on me)

  I do not deny that what you are describing can take its toll as well ( it did on me)

I left one job in an ambulance after physically collapsing at work. They sacked me for it. I had a good lawyer though and they were useless so I walked away with a big cash lump, didn’t really make up for 18 months of hell though.

@tonyf1

What I’m not doing is constantly referring to my pay scale because being a GP means I deserve to be paid more when you correct for qualification.

And that’s not what I’m doing either.

What I am saying is that the government has acknowledged the degradation of doctor’s pay in real terms over the past 15 years and given hospital doctors of all seniorities a 20% pay rise that they haven’t given to us GPs.

At the same time GP recruitment and retention is in dire straits and the government purports to be making solving it a priority. In that case, where’s our 20% pay rise that all our colleagues have had?

@DT78

The argument if different decisions were made many years / decades ago for a different career choice is a not a logical one,

It is, because although years ago you were correct, people didn’t tend to opt out of medicine once they were on the career path. Now they very much do because the other options are more attractive.

@stumpyjon

Conversely being a GP isn’t life threatening situation after life threatening situation, there’s loads of mundane appointments and worried well in between.

Question. Which is harder, finding a needle in a haystack, or a needle in a pile of needles?

The common misconception is that the life threatening situations are the difficult bit. They’re not. It’s the so-called “mundane appointments and worried well” (your words, definitely not mine) that are the difficult bit that take the skill and knowledge.

Did you miss the bit that said ‘starting salary’?

No but a starting salary at a magic circle firm isn’t anywhere near the average, as I demonstrated earlier. And obviously being board level at an engineering firm isn’t a starting salary either.

The point is you have to compare like for like and with all due respect to doctors, you’re nowhere near being able to assume that just because you studied for a few more years you’ll have automatically made it into the magic circle or to the very top of an engineering firm. If only it was that easy!

I think this thread is done for me.

If you don’t have what it takes (either in terms of motivation or ability or whatever) to progress through the management ranks in the NHS, what makes you think you’d have been able to do it in another profession in the private sector?

Is this serious?

If you’re capable of getting to the top of a solicitor or engineering firm then you’re capable of rising up the ranks in the NHS, surely.
To where?

I’m a GP. There’s nowhere else for me to go, apart from into management.

Was this a consideration when you chose your career? (That’s a genuine question, btw, from someone who never knew what he wanted to do and still doesn’t!)