The Doctors Union demanding a 26% pay increase, Strikes on the way
 

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/12...0891039503.jpg
Image of Angry Nurses
with a few Doctors


Live Debate Now on LBC


[Junior doctors, who are set to be
balloted on strike action in early January,
are demanding a pay rise of nothing less
than 26 per cent.]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...ody-think.html


Talk of Emergency Care
halted from day 1


3 Days of Solid Strike being talked about
for Monday

Just what the NHS needs.... how long is the public going to put up with this, I wonder?

No one out in the street clapping for them now, I see.

The NHS is done. Its finished. The Tories have successfully snuffed it out, these strikes are nothing more than a death rattle. You will not get decent care in the UK any more - not state funded, and not private... The staff for both will be replaced by cheap imported labour and unskilled/untrained near-minimum-wage domestic staff. Its more or less that simple.

They'll probably try to blame the ex-staff but :shrug:most of those will have moved on, either to work elsewhere in the world or to a different career.

Healthcare spending in the United Kingdom (UK) as a share of the gross domestic product
(GDP) has increased since 1990, where it was 5.1 percent. By 2021, healthcare
expenditure in the UK amounted to 11.9 percent of the GDP. Graph in link


https://www.statista.com/statistics/...nited-kingdom/

How is it that the wages of Doctors and Nurses are much lower then they were 30 years ago but politicians wages are at their highest ever level.

if the striking workers asked for reasonable increases there would be greater public support for them.

Lets not forget it was Rishi that tried to increase NI to pump more money into the NHS, everyone complained and Truss scrapped it

im pretty sure a doctor 30 years ago did not earn more than one today :joker:

its not done at all,IF the fat cats were to use the money given in the proper manner ,there would be better services .If monies were applied to the departments that need them.,so much for using the phase its a vocation,well its obviously not its all about money,no denying most do a great job,but I know from a friend whos wife is a nurse,they are not on their uppers as some would have us believe,some things need to be changed of course, but imo,all these strikes are just to bring the government down and they probably will,in a way thats my hope,lets see others do it better,it will be interesting to see how others deal with the situation today.Seems everyone has an answer but nothing is applied.

Their wages didn't rise with inflation

Junior doctors average salary in 1990 adjusted for inflation was about £45k, average junior doctors salary in 2023 is about £35k.

Consultants average salary for 1990 adjusted for inflation is £105000. Actual consultants average in 2023 is £80000.

Youre just... Not correct on this one. The numbers are all googlable.

Adam made no mention of inflation in his post and in his claim

so my statement was correct

26% is obviously not possible.

However much better is needed.
I 100% support the Doctors.

This lot over the last going on 13 years now of which 5 had the full support of Lib Dems, have FAILED miserably the NHS and the staff in it.

A disgrace.

Then it's also correct to say that I get paid significantly more each month than victorian-era aristocracy. I'm rich! :shocked:. Finally!

there are very few that have seen real increases in earnings over the last 20 years. Everything has been brought to a head by the obscenity that has been the conservative government over the last couple of years and it's now been topped off by the tories pandering to brexit that has crippled us when combined with the cost of living crisis. Not forgetting the corruption on a massive scale overseen by the conservatives.

That said, the strikers know their pay demands are not reasonable, and if that costs lives, it's going to go down very badly

They set their demands high but would settle for less if a reasonable offer was on the table, there would no point setting the amount and the lowest as that works in the government favour

They've seen large real terms pay cuts, never mind pay increases, that's the whole point.

And strike pay demands are not supposed to be reasonable - they're supposed to be a barter system where strikers ask for the world, get offered a pittance, refuse it, then get a reasonable offer which they accept. That's literally how strike action works. The demand is a negotiation stance. I don't know if people aren't aware of that, or simply pretend not to be.

Also it will cost lives, and refusing to pay them more will and probably already has cost lives. The refusal to negotiate is going to collapse the NHS and that's going to cost so many lives it'll make any lives lost to this seem like small change.

it's not a negotiating tactic because they just get told to **** off.

I remember Corbyn warning about what was going to happen to the NHS, and he was smeared as promoting Russian disinformation. Good old 2019.

Yes because the Tories don't want to negotiate, they want the NHS to collapse. It's barely even concealed at this point.

They're trying to make strike action illegal, the dystopian vibes are sadly very real.

No one's trying to make strike action illegal. They want to ensure that certain industries have to provide a basic cover during strike action. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

i also have to disagree with you that the NHS is near collapse and I say that from personal experience. With an organisation as large as the NHS, it's very easy to cherry pick areas that are stretched and forget about the areas doing a stellar job

Is the personal experience anecdotally as a patient? Because I'm well aware that the staff are working themselves to the bone to make sure that the patient experience remains decent in the vast majority of cases.

Behind the curtain it's on an absolute knife-edge. You don't have to take my word for it but I dunno... Maybe keep it in the back of your mind so that it's less shocking when it happens. It's not going to survive this in its current form. And the Tory reforms (deskilling, bulking on lesser trained and inexperienced low wage staff) that come afterwards are going to severely degrade the quality of healthcare in the UK.

The vague chance it has is if it can cling on until a government change - but realistically I know that England is never going to vote the Tories out of power either.

i was in the ICU having suffered a stroke and have spent the last 10 months regularly visiting as an out patient across 3 different hospitals in the area. So I've had a good chance to form an opinion

Sorry to hear that BOTS, I hope thing are going well. Like I said the staff are incredible and taking the world on their shoulders right now, part of the reason for the strikes of course is about ensuring that these professions remain attractive to good quality staff, not just the salaries of the current staff. Critical care services (not A&E unfortunately, but once triaged) especially are doing well all things considered.

The structural elements holding it all together are falling apart. They're losing staff by the day quicker than they can recruit, and even if that wasn't the case, an NQN or first year junior doctor is no replacement for a nurse with a decade of experience or a burnt out registrar. There really are looming issues that the current government has shown no inclination to tackle... In fact a pointed aversion to tackling... So I just don't think they're going to be resolved.

26% ? That's not gonna happen, no matter how much they strike.
It's completely unreasonable.

If the Government made the job something someone was willing to spend a huge amount of years at uni for to be worth it in the end and also made it impossible for foreign doctors and nurses to come and do the most important job in the country there would be no need to strike would there

That's where they are heading indeed.
Certainly going to tie firmly the hands of strikers to ensure less effectiveness of any of their action.
The pathetic bunch of incompetent Ministers who are blaming ANYONE and everyone else for their own almighty failure with the NHS over the going on 13 years almost.
Disgraceful.

The Doctors and nurses don't want to strike, they've been pushed over the edge by the government yet now the government answer is to purposely restrict action by them.
I'm sure the new extreme strike legislation will be challenged in the courts and if it is I hope it's successful in that challenge.

It's obvious 26% is not going to be possible but starting higher is sensible because as to this current number crunching waste of space PM, that's all he understands.

Good luck from me to ALL nurses and Doctors and others taking action to even just try to expose the lack of decency of and take on this totally inept government.

Doctors think they are so smart and deserve so much they are actually nothing. The contribute nothing to the economy yet want to take so much. Pay them just lightly more than the useless nurses please

BBC News Text:
[Senior doctors have voted in favour
of a 48-hour walk out from 20 July,
just two days after the end of a planned
five-day strike by junior doctors.
The paper says the action will leave the
health service, able to provide only the most
urgent and emergency care and quotes Matthew Taylor,
chief executive of the NHS Confederation,
calling the situation
"uncharted territory for a post-pandemic NHS".]

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cp...ph-nc.png.webp

it's not like the government hasn't been warned and they have time to make them a sensible offer

The whole thing is ****ed by both internal and external politics unfortunately. The NHS is done. There is one VAGUE chance of pulling out of the tailspin at the last moment, and that's if 1) Labour gets in at the next GE and 2) Labour gets back around the table very quickly and makes large-scale changes.

But I'm far from convinced that #1 will happen at all, and even if it does, I'm not convinced there will be a huge amount of movement on #2. Not quickly enough to matter, anyway.

It's one of those situations in which it's easy to see both sodes - the 25%+ increase is technically a correction, and they've not been paid "properly" in ages; but it's hard to have sympathy for people on upwards of £90k who want to increase their pay by at least a quarter!

That would total a huge burden on the already overburdened NHS.

I think a lot of bottom-up changes need to be made tbh. Pissing money away on diversity lectures and paying for people to "transition" is a luxury, and shouldn't even be considered while there's a shortage of Beds and people are being underpaid.

:shrug: You only need to take a look at the international pay standards (and no not just the US; other countries with socialised healthcare too) to see that both doctors and trained nurses in the UK are starting to lag way behind and the gap is increasing. So there are effectively two choices; we start paying these staff better, or we accept that the UK is not a first-world country capable of providing first-world healthcare.

And then exactly the same thing will happen as happens in developing nations; the staff who have any real skill/ability/talent pack their bags and move to countries that will pay them appropriately for their level of knowledge and skill, and we get left with the low-wage dregs.

Tories are already looking at shortening the length of healthcare education to funnel more staff through quicker. Competence levels will drop and people will die. There's no two ways about it.

Just pray you never get into a serious accident or develop a life-threatening or severe ongoing condition, I guess.

I wasn't making a case against their payrise at all. But it should be coupled with widespread changes as to how NHS money should be spent, with more priority given to front line staff.

I agree to an extent but I don't think the bulk of the problem actually lies in healthcare development/lecturing/"niche healthcare" (not to say there can't be other debates around those topics, just that it's not really the financial burden).

There are huge day-to-day inefficiencies in every type of service that add up to a lot more in terms of resource wastage than operating a diverse range of services.

I'd say both need to be considered.

I dunno, I mean I think everyone is aware that I'm no fan of money being spent on things like transition (especially with kids) but, for one, realistically in terms of healthcare it's an absolutely minuscule amount of money to the point of being insignificant, and also if making changes there it would be most ethical to ringfence that funding for the mental health services that should be available instead (and frankly... a lot more resources than that).

Affirmation is actually the easy (and cheap) option.

How is it cheaper than having it be a private-only service? Miniscule as it may be, I don't see how it's a justifiable public expense.

Because as I said the elephant in the room is that the people who are under these services more often than not need far more significant ongoing mental health support, and mental health is already chronically under-resourced.