How much do you think junior doctors get paid?

As do ours, actually!
It’s further to put it in front of the drive, than it is to leave it by the side.
I think they hate me.

DrP

I really think people saying things like “ever met a poor doctor” and “they aren’t struggling” are massively missing the point.

This isn’t about junior doctors asking for more money – it is about doctors, many of whom are already stretched to the limits of what they can do, asking that they don’t receive large pay cuts and even more hours.

And perhaps even more importantly, asking that the government and press stop misrepresenting them as lazy, incompetent or greedy.

My GP wife crashed the car into a neighbours car after reversing round a wheelie bin left at the end of the drive.

I have no idea if there is a point to my post, but seems topical to link the bin men point to the doctor point. I think

It is however illuminati e that medical school remains hugely oversubscribed

Has jivehoneyjive been informed of this? 😆

ever met a poor doctor

Would it make you feel better if they were poor?

Salaries are usually defined by the level of risk that someone is responsible for. Doctors have the ability to save lives and, if they get it wrong, ruin or take lives. On that basis they deserve a good salary.

Most people probably do want their Doctor to be relatively bright.

These days most bright people can find less stressful ways to earn more money without every politician, forumite and Daily Mail reader having a go at them, and without the moronic government initiatives and reorganisations we deal with on a yearly basis.

Those who think that the current pay is enough may be correct in emotional terms, but the market simply doesn’t worklike that. Reducing pay of a workforce which is already inadequate, and can go and do other things, is dumb,

It’s very simple really, but some people posting above will be whinging when the NHS really goes downhill, as it will, over the next few years. And by then it will take 10 years to undo the damage.

That does seem to be not much. My first job as a graduate Engineer with a large multinational on their graduate training scheme was the current equivalent of £26,848.57 (accounting for inflation over the last 20+ years).

I suspect junior doctor’s wages haven’t kept pace with inflation and so used to be better.

university pay scale for research

grade 5 undergraduate 20-27k
grade 6 PhD just qualified 27-33K
grade 7 PhD with experience 33-40K (lecturer pay point)
grade 8 senior lecturer 40-51K

not many people get a lectureship

surely the answer is not as much as they deserve for the responsibilities, but they are not doing it to be on the same money/hours in 20/30 years time are they? its a career path and they are starting at the bottom after training, much like a lot of industries,

i work in mental health,(top of band 3, I’ve been here a while )we get a new locum doctor who works under the consultant every 3 months maybe? some of them can barely tie their own shoes, £21k seems fair sometimes

same money/hours in 20/30 years time

Money no, hours quite possibly.

its a career path and they are starting at the bottom after training, much like a lot of industries,

As mentioned earlier, a “junior doctor” is basically just a doctor that hasn’t made it to Consultant yet. It’s not just the pimply faced graduates. Some will have been practising doctors for well over a decade. They’ll be getting paid more than that starting salary (as you’d expect) but they’ll still be on the same long crap hours and still rotated round to a different hospital every six months or so.

an they? Average UK salary is £26,500

Mean, median or mode?

Median. Actually it looks like it has gone up:

For the year ending 5 April 2014 median gross annual earnings for full-time employees (who had been in the same job for at least 12 months) were £27,200, an increase of 0.7% from the previous year.

— Source: ONS

Whats the mode though, gives a much more realistic picture. Also, those with job insecurity are removed from the data set for some reason that no doubt inflates the picture

I don’t think, given 5-7 years of training, with a debt of (probably) £40k, that £22k per annum is good money.

My wife is on 37k 6 months out of university and she’s adamant she can make that 40-45k in one more year, with a degree in economics. She has loads less responsibility than a junior doctor – 22k is far far to low considering med students tend to be the best of the best.

Becoming a lawyer or a doctor would be a step down in terms of pay for her, which is IMO a complete joke. But hey what the hell do I care…..I get new bikes. Buohahahah.

Not read all 4 pages but the simple answer is no where near enough
Especially when you compare to certain other professions

Whats the mode though, gives a much more realistic picture.

How do you figure that?
If I have a selection of eleven people and they are on: 5k, 27k, 28k, 30k, 29k, 42k, 19k, 100k, 41k, 5k, 60k then the Mode would be 5k. How is that more representative?

Anyway that ONS link has all the source data tables if you fancy dicking about in Excel.

I agree with Tom above, I work in finance and get considerably more than a fully trained doctor (if the stats on this thread are to be believed) and I didn’t even go to university; and I am much less stressed.

@Poah

I’m sure you know as well as I do that whilst that may be the official university payscale there’s a heck of a lot of experienced postdocs, PhD’s, graduates and experienced graduates being paid at band 4 level (17K-20K) because there is a massive over supply of scientists at these levels and the only jobs they can get are being advertised at HNC/HND level but the universities know they will be employing graduates and better when they create the job advert. (Certainly true in life sciences)

Not enough – should become vets

Don’t like it don’t do it no one holds gun to your head FFS

If no-one becomes a pro footballer, I reckon we’d all make it through. If no-one becomes a doctor, we are in deep trouble!

Would it make you feel better if they were poor?

There are plenty of countries where doctors are poor. Often, they demand bribes to treat patients even in “free” healthcare systems. It’s not, on balance, a great way to run things.

I wouldn’t say it was underpaid, it’s still more than engineering and thats so complicated ive given up explaining to people what it is i do :-p

As for hours, depending on the company ive had friends on anything from 35-60 hour weeks.

Risk of being sent to a hospital 100 miles away? How about egypt, iraq, Saudi, emirates, Kazakhstan, india, nw australia, korea, Thailand and singapore on conditions ranging from excelent to take or your fired?

Yup Rob, I’m just going to do my CFA and jack this science crap in. Balls to it, I’m just going to join the enemy.

Masters in something mathsy and a CFA should do it. No more staring at HPLC instruments for less than 10 an hour, yay.

Is it cheating if you are sys admin for the financial system in a mid sized hospital?

Not enough – should become vets

Much harder to get into, something which always perplexed me. Vets get paid more as its fundamentally a private sector business. Many of the wife’s family are doctors and dentists is France, All private practice and some very financially successful. Different system there, a hybrid between state and private insurance. There is a lesson there I say.

Not really.
French hospital medicine is rather good. Unless you are in Paris in August.
French general practice is weird, poorly paid in many places, and prescribes stuff the rest of Europe stopped using 40 years ago.

All systems have their problems. Ours is mainly a combination of entrenched inefficiency and high-handedness by some managers and consultants, and continuing political meddling.

Might start higher as a vet but don’t go as high as Consultants etc Most of those 20+ will be partners owning their own business like GPs. Take into consideration lack of public sector pension and the gap probably narrows more at the start and grows at the top end.

SPVS salary survey 2014. Industry standard benchmarking.

Fat cats of the feline variety may be on the rise but the same cannot be said of the vets who treat them. The 2014 SPVS Salaries Survey is published today and reveals that, while most vets have experienced very little salary increase on last year, those in the 10 years qualified category have actually lost out with a median 9.2% drop in salary.

Total salary packages varied from £31,150 for newly qualified vets (up 0.5% on last year) to £69,021 for vets qualified for more than 20 years, who were one of the few winners with a double digit increase of 11.9%. This is in marked contrast to the majority of ‘years qualified’ categories that experienced negative growth. The variation in salary increases was less dramatic in terms of hourly rates, which ranged from £16.30 for new graduates to £34.61 for the most experienced vets.

Bloody high rate of killing yourself too.

Centre for Suicide Research | Research | Suicide in high risk occupations |

Suicide in high risk occupational groups – farmers, doctors, female nurses, veterinary surgeons

Several occupational groups in the United Kingdom appear to have considerably elevated risk of suicide. These include, for example, farmers, doctors (especially females), dentists, pharmacists, veterinary surgeons, and female nurses. We have conducted separate research investigations of suicide in farmers, doctors and female nurses in England and Wales. The three studies have each included psychological autopsy investigations (see Hawton, Appleby, Platt et al. (1998) below for a description of this approach). All these projects were commissioned and funded by the Department of Health. We are currently conducting research on suicide in veterinary surgeons.

I’ve mentally written this over and over; I’ve never been a very good writer and suspect this will poorly reflect my intended eloquence but here goes.

I feel completely powerless with respect to my professional future. By this I don’t mean with respect to my patient care, personal educational development or actual maintenance of a job, rather I mean that the future of my profession is increasingly bleak in the UK. Sadly the government has decided to contractually alter doctors conditions within the NHS so as to render it difficult to see a reasonable future employment model. The details of their plan are crystalising and I just cannot understand how anyone would make a rational decision to enter the profession any more. Trainees have already been clinically disempowered and are now being financially penalised. Those currently in training will have their consultant conditions radically altered – to their detriment and there seems to be a growing trend towards well paid physicians assistants at the cost of doctors. Who, I wonder, will hold the medical liability for their role? Consultants currently in contracts will soon, I fear, have them altered.

I see tweets and Facebook posts and although I now write one, I have no expectation that they will make any difference. The government is intent on their plan, the public seem poorly informed and there is almost no ‘industrial action’ that can be taken. How can a doctor strike? It feels morally wrong and would hand a massive ‘PR victory’ to the government. You could almost see the headlines now – ‘Doctors abandon patient care for the Golf Course’… some canards never die and you can bet the entire spin machine of Westminster will ensure they don’t. Mass emigration or resignation – sounds great but we all know that will never happen. On the whole we have children in schools, partners in jobs, family responsibilities and more that would make moving, resigning or emigrating difficult to say the least. Again, the government knows this and will use this lever to bludgeon what they want thorough Parliament in the knowledge that there is little effective route to opposition. I’m led to believe that in Australia doctors engaged in a modified strike in that they refused to sign birth and death certificates resulting in significant disruption to daily life and that seems a potential approach – should we be able to engage in action in a united fashion? Would it achieve anything tangible?

I think it’s pretty clear that the endgame here is the restructuring of the NHS and I suspect the end model will be some sort of medical provision with the NHS acting as a smart purchaser of care from a range of chambers. I suspect that altering the doctors’ contracts so harshly is intended to force us to set up companies to provide these chambers and equally wonder if the whole idea of punishing trainees so harshly is to equally induce those chambers to train in house? But this leaves huge potential service gaps – acute and emergency care being one. If this is the intent of Westminster why not just say so? Why not treat the population who elected the government in as adults? “Look, UK, we have no money to maintain the NHS in an effective manner – and here is the evidence for this – so here is our vision”. Instead they choose to scaremonger and manipulate. It all seems a bit Orwellian to me – especially in light of the ‘all animals are good but some are better than others’ approach of a politician pay rise while the rest of the public sector remains frozen. How is that even justifiable? It was done with no apparent attempt at public debate under the reasoning that you have to pay more to get quality. Does that mean the NHS, civil service and MOD – to name a few – don’t need to be of quality as they are effectively suffering a real terms pay cut.

So I feel powerless. This attempt at diarising my concerns will never have the readability, publicity or coverage of a Boris Johnson article and I don’t for an instant believe Jeremy Hunt or David Cameron would ever read this and to some extent I wonder if I am just feeding the dying embers of the last whimper of the NHS but in the interest of my own mens sana I had to at least write it.

We live in interesting times.

Another big post. This is an open letter to an MP from one of our medical friends who is facing a 30% pay cut in these changes. It sums up a lot of what has been said:

Dear Mrs. Bruce,

I am writing to you in follow-up to my e-mail of 24th July to which I still look forward to your reply. The situation regarding the government’s treatment of the NHS and the medical profession has moved on since then, and in particular I wish to address the matter of the new junior doctor contract which, as things stand, will apparently be imposed from next August.

As I previously explained, I am an anaesthetic registrar who is due to complete my training in August 2017. I graduated from medical school in 2006 and I have been a ‘junior doctor’ for all this time. The term refers to all doctors in training, from those who have just completed medical school to those who are on the verge of becoming consultants, and as encompasses a wide range of skills and experience.

The new contract will fundamentally alter the way we are paid, in line with recent recommendations from the Review Body on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Remuneration, which have been roundly condemned by the profession itself. I expect it will be publicly sold as a pay rise, as the basic pay will indeed be increasing, but our salaries are significantly impacted by a ‘banding supplement’ to cover out of hours work. For myself this provides 50% on top of basic pay (a fairly standard rate), i.e. one third of my salary. These banding payments are to be abolished and replaced with a much lower supplement that, together with a redefinition of what counts as unsocial hours, means I am facing a pay cut of somewhere between 10-30% of my salary (by current estimates).

The only trainees who will actually experience a pay rise are the few in specialities with little or no out of hours commitment. Those of us who routinely work evenings, nights and weekends (including my beleaguered colleagues in Emergency Medicine) will be hit hardest. GP trainees will also stand to lose a significant chunk of their income – this when a recruitment crisis already exists!

The new contract will also particularly hit those who take parental leave, those who take time away from training to obtain higher qualifications such as a PhD (as expected in several specialities) and those who change specialities, as I did in 2010. At present, my salary reflects the training and experience that I obtained before entering anaesthesia, which continues to be of use to me today. In the future, dropping back to the bottom of the pay scale may be a bar to someone wishing to move to a speciality for which they are better suited.

I am not pleading poverty, but a pay cut of this magnitude is not an appropriate way to treat a group of highly trained, highly skilled individuals doing an important and very responsible job. I know I am not alone in having made financial commitments that I would not have made had I known I was faced with losing potentially almost a third of my income.

Since qualifying, I have seen medical training overhauled, including the debacle that was MTAS/MMC. Along with many others I have moved hundreds of miles, away from family and friends, to continue my training. I have seen accumulation of the correct paperwork seemingly become more important than clinical ability. I have seen changes to our pensions that mean we get to pay more for the privilege of retiring later and receiving less (despite the NHS pension scheme being a net contributor to the economy). For this I get a pay cut.

I have worked well beyond my contracted hours on a regular basis and have been in work for more nights and weekends than I could tell you. I have missed birthdays, weddings and Christmases, neglecting my loved ones in the process. I have gained skills and experience that allow me to work increasingly independently and also to provide training to those junior to me, often in my own time. For this I get a pay cut.

I pay over £1000 annually in professional fees – these are not optional payments and I am not counting membership of the BMA. I have paid over £2000 to sit required postgraduate exams. I am still paying off my student loan. I pay several hundred pounds a year to park at my workplace! For this I get a pay cut.

I have been punched, scratched and bitten in the course of my job (generally by those who aren’t in a position to know better). I have called families in at 5am to explain to them that their loved one is dying. I have played a major role in the saving of many lives. I go to work every day knowing that if I am not on the ball, a patient could come to harm or worse. For this I get a pay cut.

I am not at all unique in any of this. Normally these are not causes for complaint – they are part of the job – but in the present circumstances I feel it is important to describe what the job actually entails. We have listened to one health secretary after another (in particular the present one) tell the public that we are greedy, workshy and to blame for the systemic problems in the NHS, when none of them have shown much sign of understanding our work.

For the first time in my career, I am seriously considering taking my skills and training overseas. I believe in the NHS but these changes show that we, as a workforce, are not valued. I didn’t go into medicine for the money but I do expect my salary to reflect what I have put into my career. I don’t believe that other developed countries treat their medics with the contempt shown to us by the current government. Many of us will leave and find that our lives (in and out of work) are better elsewhere. Nurses and other allied health professionals will quite reasonably wonder if they are next in line for this sort of treatment.

As in my previous e-mail, I implore you to support the workforce of the NHS and oppose this wholesale erosion of our conditions. I have never seen my colleagues as angry as they are now.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Rachel Smith

If I have a selection of eleven people and they are on: 5k, 27k, 28k, 30k, 29k, 42k, 19k, 100k, 41k, 5k, 60k then the Mode would be 5k. How is that more representative?

Because the country has many more than 11 people in it who work?

Because the country has many more than 11 people in it who work?

I don’t really want to get derailed into a discussion about stats, but that still doesn’t make Mode a good way of assessing what people earn does it?

For example let’s say a very large employer has a structured pay scheme with set remuneration levels. That increases the frequency of those specific salaries and makes them more likely to be the Mode.

e.g. Let’s say all Tesco store managers earn exactly £31,637.90 a year. That might be a big enough employer and common enough position to make that figure the most frequent in the survey, so it would be the Mode. But how would that be helpful when we know (from the median) that the majority of established full-time workers are paid four grand less than that?

With respect to median, mode and mean, the comparison is pretty bogus. Doctors do not work median, mode or mean hours, at median, mode or mean times of the day (or night, or week, or year) and don’t have median, mode or mean levels of training and education.

… Or responsibility, or rates of stress and suicide.

Thats true but we were discussing the national average wage. The mean is squewed by high earners and median is not representative of what most people earn either. Mode would be better when looking for what people earn on a national level. And thats before we discus the 24k figure only included people who had been in the same job a year ( which would I expect get rid of a lot of lower earners)

PS I think Dr’s get a shit deal by the way

Also, because I’m a old school leftie and I think that the real struggle is not between workers but between workers and capitalists, 22k is about the annual return on a buy-to-let costing 200k. Ie you’d be paid the same amount as a junior doc earns by simply owning a mid-sized terrace house in the north of England and sitting on your arse all day long. Source: http://www.moneyobserver.com/news/28-05-2015/buy-to-let-annual-return-rises-above-111-billion

median is not representative of what most people earn either. Mode would be better when looking for what people earn on a national level

I really don’t understand your logic there. If you work full-time and receive a median salary then half of the full-time working population receive less than you and half receive more. That seems like a reasonable definition of “average”.

Conversely if you happen to be on the median salary then you just receive an amount that happens to come up frequently for whatever reason. It may be unusually high or unusually low compared to what everyone else gets.

Anyway this is getting well OT. Whatever definition you use a 15-30% pay cut plus possibly additional hours for an already extremely hard working and stretched workforce is a shit deal that seems specifically designed to destroy the NHS by stealth.

Incidentally I’ve heard rumours that the government are currently trying to block Certificates of Good Standing from being issued to ST3’s and lower in the hope that they can prevent a mass exodus of junior doctors to other countries.
Meanwhile we are heavily recruiting doctors and nurses from third-world countries who need them more than us.

Incidentally I’ve heard rumours…

That would, I think, be the last straw for people thinking about quitting to do something else, just because of the sheer level of disrespect that would demonstrate. I anticipate it will be with us within the month.

It beats me why there are any doctors at all in this country. (If it was all about money)

Australia or the USA would give them a much better deal.

The NHS is brilliant but our politicians’ agenda is to monetise it and flog it off to their mates. There is no other logical reason for the way they are trying to destroy it. (Apart from stupidity)

(Apart from stupidity)

Hanlon’s Razor:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

… although in this case it may just be malice.