After recent strikes, a Consultant earns £150,000 a year and will have a gold plated pension.
Junior doctors have held patients to ransom. If they choose to train as a GP they can look forward to a senior partner pay of £135,000 with no responsibility for cover out of hours during the week or the whole of the weekend.
Junior doctors in hospital complain about how little support they get from their consultants.
We the patient can’t get to see a GP in a timely fashion. This only rational way to get to see a Consultant is to go privately.
It seems to have been an intractable problem for a long time and one perhaps more likely to be improved by a Labour government, when the conservatives in power felt they couldn’t be seen to undermine or breakup the NHS.
In the meantime, the waiting lists get longer ,,,.
I live in hope that our change of government will bring a new way of thinking and improvement to the beleaguered NHS. At this early stage, I remain optimistic as Starmer is looking to be a modest, moderate and sensible character with a private life that also suggests decency and a deep capacity for caring and love.
Unfortunately a large part of the problem with the NHS is sheer demand due to the unhealthy nature of a large part of the population. The reasons for the poor health of many Britons are complicated, but poor diet is among the foremost. Britain tops the European charts for consumption of UPFs and is not far behind America. Tackling the food industry has always proved to be difficult and the Tories have always shown no real desire to do so. I doubt Labour will have much more success even if the desire were there.
I have hopes given the utter debacle we’ve been through with the last lot.
I am aware of the commercial pressures brought to bear but we are still free to make choices (and indeed are proud of that freedom). I would think that a better, if not ideal, diet and lifestyle can be had by anyone if they choose.
Children are not able to make such choices and unhealthy eating patterns are set early in life. Indeed there is evidence that the diet of the mother when the foetus is in the womb can have effects on the future health of her offspring as can smoking or drug consumption. There has to be a concerted effort from government to counter advertising. This should be done by education. Children should be taught as early as possible that the role of adverts of any sort is to get people to buy things they don't necessarily need and which might do them harm. All advertising of UPFs should be banned and proper domestic science lessons should be brought back where key skills like cooking are taught . I remember being horrified when my grandchildren said that one of the projects in what passed as "home economics " (what domestic science morphed into) was to design a wrapper for a chocolate bar! When questioned they said they never learned to cook or sew or do basic woodwork or anything useful.
That is spot on. I feel that early experience at home is far more important than even early years at school. It seems that these create the framework that school can then build on. Often, I read, a useful framework is not in place by which time habits are already becoming ingrained.
I do think that much of what parents do is worrying in terms of feeding choices, right from birth (and, as you say, even before).
Well it will happen all right many pensioners will have to choose between eating and heating. Not all but a large amount, starmer and his team of clowns should be ashamed .
I work with UK medics, in my past consultants and for 20 years GPs.
GP salaries vary wildly. My role is in finance. Some can earn 70k others 200k plus. This depends on a multitude of factors. I don’t know any GPs that work a regular day. We once did an exercise looking at GP hours worked and how this equates to an hourly rate - it showed that they earn poorly in comparison to how many hours they put in.
As auriculaire points out the demand outstrips capacity particular post pandemic. An ‘average person’ gives a GP practice approx £100 income for a whole year of care whether you go once or 50 times!
I know several consultants. The ones I know often work 7 days a week. Will work through the night after a day shift to perform emergency lifesaving surgery (as happened last week with a colleague!)
For me they earn every penny.
I don’t think it is about salaries at all but a fractured, badly managed NHS that needs a complete overhaul.
I await what happens to the NHS under the new government.
Hear, hear. I worked with doctors for 20 years and, although that was several years ago, I hold them in high regard indeed. Of course, they are people with all of the foibles, strengths and weaknesses inherent in that, but they will always get my vote. I read too many negative comments about doctors online these days. It didn't used to be that way and, I suspect, social media has its part to play.
Hear, hear again. Social media amplifies the sinister agenda to dismantle the NHS and introduce the US system: healthcare for profit, a licence to print money. Medical bills are the no.1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the US.
Some people here wang on about 'inefficiency' and 'reform'. The latter, perhaps, but not in the sense that's usually meant by the anti-NHS brigade: it should start with expanding opportunities for medical training (more places, more bursaries, from doctors and nurses on down to radiographers and phlebotomists) and funding more posts. Many departments have had staff shortages for years.
I do believe that GPs were given all these benefits (no evening call outs, no weekends, big pay rise) when Tony Blair was in office (Labour?). Prior to that we had Saturday morning surgeries, evening call out and weekend call out if needed. The GP service has gone down since then. Particularly so since COVID. These days they mainly hide behind their phones. We don’t have one doctor in our practice who works a full week. They are either job sharing, or do work elsewhere one day a week.
May I first ask if you or one of your family is a doctor? My son is an F2 doctor and seems very happy with his job though complains bitterly about the lack of support from some of his consultants.
I think the real problem here is the lack of appropriately appointed medical students. It should not be a requirement for a medical applicant to have high A level grades. Much more important are qualities like empathy and emotional intelligence. Resilience too. All those will help a junior doctor to withstand the early pressures of their training to become a GP.
I’m less certain about the required skills for secondary care, apart from the obvious ones like the much missed General Physicians who have largely been replaced by the Geriatricians , the Frailty consultants and the Palliative Care consultants. These guys know more about holistic medicine than all the rest put together.
When you talk about “no big pay rises here” in your last paragraph are you talking about the threatened action by GPs?
At the end of the day they are all eventually going to be as rich as Croesus doing not much work. Did they ever think about the rises for the nurses , allied professionals and ancillary staff.
Most of my friends have lost any remaining respect for most doctors. Not interested in their patients, just in maximising their income as quickly as possible so they can retire early on as I said, a gold plated pension.
Doctors are actually doing more consultations with patients every day than before - they just aren't all face to face, in order to manage the increased workload. There is a shortage of GPs (see The Health Foundation's article "The GP shortfall in numbers "), and under the last government, GP practices have not been allocated funds to recruit the new GPs they need, now leading to some newly qualified GPs being unable to find GP jobs! Instead GP practices can recruit "Physician Assistants" who do just 2 years medical training after some other scientific and often health-related degree, and so much less chance of being familiar with the huge range of undiagnosed conditions presented by patients - as opposed to the 10 years medical training and experience of different conditions a GP has by the time they qualify as a GP.
In one big American owned chain of GP practices "analysis of NHS data also showed that (it) employs six times as many physician associates as the NHS average and operates with half the number of GPs." There's an account from an undercover investigator who spent 6 weeks in one of these practices "Operose Health: What I saw working undercover at a GP surgery" - you can google for it - which found what certainly seems like unsafe practice.
It's not clear that Labour will reverse this trend. Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting have both taken donations from people with big financial interests in private healthcare corporations.
In my experience Physician Associates are useless. They are way out of their depth. They are a US idea, I believe. I don’t think they have sufficient training and skills. I know there are probably some good committed people in those jobs but to put them into general practice and do the equivalent of GP work is a very dangerous practice. There was one at my surgery and she was useless. It taught me to always ask for the name and job title during a telephone consultation, because many people will assume they’re talking to a doctor.
You're wise to check. I saw a report of a Physician Associate who was using the title Dr - she had a PhD in something different! Very misleading. It's going to be important for us not to assume the prefix Dr means we're speaking to a medical doctor, but to check what their job is even then.
Great respect for doctors in the NHS - but do think that top tier earn more than enough (it's not just the direct pay, they have a huge pension contribution paid by us) and junior doctors not quite enough (but they often forget that pension they'll get).
Don't forget that many of those highly paid also have some private work and many of those on strange hours are getting locum pay rates, which can be very high. Also many GPs are in addition building a stake in a practice which they may sell (for £££s) when they retire/move.
Stressful job, but not many working non-medics have the security of knowing they can easily find work.
We need to train more of them but also not keep depending so much on their time -- more than one study has shown that 'owning your own health' benefits you and the system.
Let’s not forget that whilst the work in the first 3 years after qualifying can occasionally be demanding for junior doctors, when they move after that in to specialty training, they are more experienced and confident and can cope easily with anything thrown at them.
And yes you’re right, out of hours work is often paid at the locum rate which can be up to twice normal rates because the managers can’t find agency locums who can be paid extortionate rates. So most junior doctors are paid much more than the mendacious BMA advertised.
Ultimately this was a manufactured crisis, expertly handled by the recently rebranded left wing BMA who ran rings around the Tory government., at the expense of the rest of us, left adrift on the scandalous sea of ever increasing waiting lists for very vulnerable people, not least the elderly and mentally ill. They knew they would win in the end because they had all the leverage. Despicable and self serving behaviour.
I don’t understand why you have “great respect” for doctors in the NHS. They were trained in large part with funding which the rest of us funded.
Like everyone else they are trained to do a job and in their case, very well paid to do it. Why should they be deemed of more respect than anyone else who gives of their best often being paid peanuts in comparison. We should hold them to high standards and expect them to do what they are paid to do, without expecting the rest of us to bend the knee like Sir Kneelalot, and just do their job properly.
So no I say , they merit none of the respect that former generations of NHS doctors from 50 years back had. In contrast they have no respect for their patients and are much more interested in what is in it for them.
And yes many, myself included, will say they like their doctor but will concede when pushed , that they are simply doing their job, as they should be.
Former generations of doctors and other medical professionals were not burdened with the shedloads of paperwork todays generation have to fill in. Most of which is useless and only purpose appears to be to avoid litigation. But if professionals were able to spend the time wasted on this paperwork actually treating patients properly there would be less danger of litigation. Malcolm Kendrick has some good articles about what is wrong with the NHS.
Stop listening to The Mail, The Express and The Telegraph. Stop listening to Farige and GB news. Stop listening to those who hate Britain and who’s every word is intended to scare you into harming the country and enriching themselves.
Clive. Thank you so much for your reply dear boy. I’m not sure whether you are including me in the above group.
But if yes, let me say I am in fact a true socialist, and not please note, a champagne socialist.
My mother’s father was from a poor Victorian family, with seven siblings. He left school at 14.
I like to read the Independent, the Times and the Guardian. I don’t believe I have ever opened a copy of the Daily Mail, let alone the Daily Express. I do hope that satisfies you of my credentials.
Fair enough. There’s no need to be confrontational. I know they want you to be angry about things but it’s not really helpful.
Taking a big picture view. Things like The NHS, workers rights and other “Socialist clap trap” have done more to improve the health of the nation than almost anything so it’s not entirely unrelated to guard against those who would do away with such things. At which point we’re back to where I started.
Excellent response Clive , to the poster above. Articulate, succint, cogent and restrained. You have certainly given me pause for thought. Funny how first impressions not infrequently turn out to be premature judgements.
How to fix the NHS - new law forbidding MPs & their immediate families from having any private medical treatment. Optionally, include senior civil servants & administrators in health-related organisations.
Hi, ill health is 24/7 not 9/5 until NHS is re organised to work 24/7 throwing money at Docs will make no difference. Any pay rise should come with a change in contract so all docs, hospital or GPs agree to cover 24/7.
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I was diagnosed with extra beats years ago, but never been given blood thinners, Is anyone else in the same boat?
Who would you recommend?
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