Underpaid UK Clinical doctors Flee Health System in Disaster

It hurts. It's unbearable sometimes. There have been many, many timesI've thought, I'm just quitting. There have been so many occasionswhen I've walked onto the ward and it has been unsafebecause of the levels of staffing. You feel devalued,you feel a little bit worthless. You feel like you're not appreciatedfor what you do. Adele is a junior doctorin the UK's National Health Service who walked out of her hospitalin a four-day strike in April, which led to more than195,000 missed appointments.

Claps don’t pay the bills,claps don’t pay the bills. In the first half of 2023, the number of canceled appointmentsamounted to almost half a million as the medical sector took partin the UK's union actions. Over the past year, the UK has recordedthe largest number of strikes since the 1980s, with sectors from healthcare to postal service workers and teachers all taking industrial action. It is not a coincidencethat they come at a time when the cost of living crisisis cutting into the pockets of the nation,.

With the cost of basic necessitiesrocketing to new levels. Industrial action is havinga serious impact on the qualityof patient care. Last week’s strikeby junior doctors caused the cancelation of almost200,000 operations and appointments. The only thing we can really do is strike,and the only cause we can really legitimately strikeabout is our pay. But it's sort of an indicatorfor loads of other stuff. Junior doctors are asking for a35% pay increase.

This round of pay negotiationsreflects both the acute squeeze created by high inflation nowand more than a decade of inadequate funding that has seenpublic sector workers fall way behind their private sectorcounterparts. So, junior doctors, their pay has increasedby about 16% in cash terms since 2008. But in that same period, inflationand other factors mean that they’re actually 25% worse off,and they’re just saying enough is enough. I've been a junior doctorfor four years now. I'm doing a ten-month longcontract in plastic surgery.

Just to get the experienceI need in order to try and make a successful applicationfor my actual training post. My current job has a higher base salary, so it's about £40,000,but I never do night shifts. The extra hours, the night shifts,they really do make up the bulk of our salaries. So when you factor all that together, I'veactually taken a pretty decent pay cut. I will usually be scheduled to work with one of the consultantsin the operating theaters.

Within plastic surgery, there's loadsof different things you could be doing. There's hand surgeries. You can do breast surgery, so it's a lot of cancer surgery. Plastic surgery includes burns. So you might be doing skin grafting. Plastic surgeons can do cleft lipand palate surgery. They can do head and neck surgery,which is largely taking tumors. At the moment, I'm on-call.

I started my on-call shift on Saturday and I will go straightthrough until this Friday. And during those shiftswe then have to do trauma clinics. So there's an awful lot of strainwithin the NHS, and the more people are struggling, the more people are burning out. Since I started work it’snot been uncommon to hear someone say that one of their colleagueshas committed suicide.

According to the British Medical Association,around seven in ten junior doctors surveyed say they alwaysor frequently work in understaffed rotas, which may be placingpatient and staff safety at risk. Around half of junior doctorsdescribed their desire to work in the NHS in the next year as low or very low. When you first move into a new house, all sorts of things spring upthat you weren't expecting to pay for. When I started my new job,there was a mistake made with my pay and it's taken five monthsto get that resolved.

I've been consistently worryingabout money, consistently in my overdraft. If any unexpected thing happens,you always feel just a heartbeat awayfrom absolute disaster, to be honest. So when it comes to pay in the NHS,the government says that it’s set by these independent peer review bodies,which they say they can't really interfere with. These peer review bodies, they will gather evidenceover the course of the year, they give their recommendationfor maybe a two, three, five percent pay rise, and although, you know,these strikes are directed.

At the government,the government is trying to, take their hands out of itand say it's not really our deal. At the same time, we're getting in a bit of an impasseright now. Junior doctors are asking for what's called full pay restoration,which would be a 35% pay rise right now. The government is sayingthat is completely unaffordable and unacceptableand they have to lower that. You know, there are some thingsthat you see at work or that you do at workthat if you were to say them.

To a person who doesn'twork in health care, they just wouldn't understandwhy you're upset. Did you work last night? Yeah. So this is nightthree of four for me. So I'm slightly delirious,but it’s OK, we're going to get through it. So I think pay is a difficult issue. On bank holidays, the personin the hospital paid the least is the F1, so the junior doctorwho's been a doctor for a year. So you get paid more in the hospitalto clean toilets on a bank holiday.

It hasn't been safe for many yearsand I don't think that will come as a shock to anyone. There is nowhere elsethat a junior doctor can work. We can't even work in private hospitals because the reason people goprivate is to ensure that they get seen by a consultant. So really our only options are ditchthe NHS entirely. A lot of people have movedto places like Australia and New Zealand, where you arevalued more highly.

About two out of fivedoctors said in a recent poll that they are looking to leave theNHS or would accept another job if that was proposed. And 80% are actuallysaying that they are constantly thinkingabout ways out as well. The ability to continue strikingis what's proving difficult because, you know, we're strikingbecause we are not being paid enough and we therefore don'treally have the ability to take that much unpaid leavefrom our work.

So I think the longer the strikes goon, the more difficult it's going to be. But I think the majority of people have reached the pointwhere they are going to do anything they have to in order to be able tocontinue striking and making that point. The fact that people arestill willing to fight tells me that people have hopethat things will get better.

Sharing is caring!