Junior Doctors strike

Germanshepherdsmum

But the buck didn’t stop with her, rather like trainee lawyers who have passed all their exams and do a lot of work but are not fully qualified.

I put this chart on another thread but it seems some people on here need a reality check. It seems a few think the Conservatives must always be shown to be right however much the truth must be twisted to make it seem that way.

Not only are the majority of doctors caring for us very much real Doctors not some weird incompetent half trained beings, but they do not get paid in relation to what they do.

I think we just have to accept that the Conservatives are out to destroy all opportunity to have a functioning NHS.

Glorianny Actually even if you believe taxes fund public spending denying people pay rises is still counterproductive. People who earn more pay more tax. Employing more people means more tax. More disposable income means more spending and so more tax(VAT).

Indeed.

Many taxes apart from income tax and NI. Lots of taxes.

Simple guide comparing old and new medical grade terminology here.
remediumpartners.com/doctor-grades-in-the-nhs/

Junior Grades
1. SHO – is the old term for a junior doctor in training now replaced by ST1 – ST2 – ST3. Also known in some hospitals as Clinical Fellow.
Training Grades
FY1 and FY2 – the first 2 years of clinical experience after qualification
ST1 – ST3 are the first 3 years of Basic Specialty Training (Old SHO)
ST4 – ST8 are the remaining 5 years of Higher Specialist Training. (Old Specialist Registrar)

foxie48

My daughter has kept in touch with school friends, they are all high achievers who went to good universities and got good jobs in a variety of fields. They all started work four years before she did as she did graduate entry medicine. They have much smaller student loans, and were earning whilst she was still paying tuition fees and taking out student loans, they were also furthering their careers and are now moving into really well paid positions whilst she's still training and taking exams. She's quite happy with this as she chose medicine as a career and has absolutely no regrets, the only time she gets a bit fed up is when she has to miss celebrations because she's working weekends or nights and she can't find anyone to change with her. This is quite frequent as she has to do a lot of nights and weekends and it really affects her ability to have a social life. For those of you who think medicine is a career like the law or accountancy or whatever, it really isn't! Doctors and other people who support us 24/7, 365 days a year should be paid to reflect this so that they can at least make their non working time as easy as they can. Try sleeping in the day time in a hot bedroom when your neighbours are out in the garden having a BBQ!

Absolutely!!

SueDonim

Fleurpepper

What is the terminology currently. It used to be

Houseman
Senior Houseman (SHO)
Registrar
Senior Registrar

Junior doctor. That’s it. It applies to everyone who is not a consultant, even if they’ve worked in the NHS for 30 years and have shedloads of experience.

Interestingly, my dd says staff use the old terms informally to denote hierarchy, as in ‘Go and ask X, she’s a senior.’

I think it was decided to refer to all non-consultants as juniors so that patients wouldn’t demand to see a senior registrar rather than a houseman.

I meant what are the different stages of 'Junior doctor' called nowadays.

Actually even if you believe taxes fund public spending denying people pay rises is still counterproductive. People who earn more pay more tax. Employing more people means more tax. More disposable income means more spending and so more tax(VAT). The only reason not to pay more is actually idealogical- "we will not be pressured by unions or strikes". There's no reason, or logic, or economics behind it.

Wyllow3

I don't use that language neither do many I know because of its associations with complaining and moaning about supporting vulnerable people of many kinds.

So I dont agree "most other taxpayers".

Good for you, Wyllow.

I like to call it 'public money' because, if we believe that 'we' are 'the state' (which I do) then it is our money which is being spent and managed on our behalf by the government in power (theoretically I assume they are in power because most of the voters liked their ideas for spending public money).

Even if I believed that taxes fund spending (though it must be very obvious by now that I don't) I'd still sidestep the 'taxpayers' money' label because most people who use it seem to equate 'taxpaying' with paying income tax only. Which makes it easy for them to scorn those on benefits. But those on benefits pay tax too via VAT on their purchases. Not a fact that the 'virtuous taxpayers' like to acknowledge...

MaizieD 👍

GrannyGravy13

MaizieD you often bring up Lady Thatcher’s household budget economics however, it is not just the Conservative Party that continues this misinformation the Labour Party support and perpetuate the exact same theory

No. I absolutely agree with you, not only all the political parties but most journalists and commentators promulgate it.

But Thatcher, you have to admit, is the most high profile exponent of it. Love her or hate her, everyone remembers her statement and her household budget analogy. Not only those who were alive at the time, but it get passed down as a truism.

But once a party gets its hands on the Treasury it surely must know that the national finances don't work like that. Governments of all shades can find however much money they want to when they think it's needed. They know that they don't need 'the taxpayer' to fund it and that they don't need to 'borrow' it either. It's just much more politically acceptable for a chancellor to shake their head sadly and say 'We'd like to do that but we just can't afford it' than for them to say 'We don't believe in supporting/funding x,y or z'

But, I very much hope that the more the general public understands how state funding works the less they'll be influenced by the 'we can't afford it', or the 'how are you going to pay for it?' statements and they'll be better able to judge the social and/or economic benefits, or drawbacks, of proposed policies. And vote accordingly

My daughter has kept in touch with school friends, they are all high achievers who went to good universities and got good jobs in a variety of fields. They all started work four years before she did as she did graduate entry medicine. They have much smaller student loans, and were earning whilst she was still paying tuition fees and taking out student loans, they were also furthering their careers and are now moving into really well paid positions whilst she's still training and taking exams. She's quite happy with this as she chose medicine as a career and has absolutely no regrets, the only time she gets a bit fed up is when she has to miss celebrations because she's working weekends or nights and she can't find anyone to change with her. This is quite frequent as she has to do a lot of nights and weekends and it really affects her ability to have a social life. For those of you who think medicine is a career like the law or accountancy or whatever, it really isn't! Doctors and other people who support us 24/7, 365 days a year should be paid to reflect this so that they can at least make their non working time as easy as they can. Try sleeping in the day time in a hot bedroom when your neighbours are out in the garden having a BBQ!

But if we don't remunerate appropriately, then doctors and nurses will go elsewhere ( Canada was the choice of my doctor BIL).
Significant sums of money paid to the leaders of large firms, top level bankers etc are justified because " we need to keep these people as they are important and we don't want them to leave". Following that hypothesis, aren't medics important?

MaizieD you often bring up Lady Thatcher’s household budget economics however, it is not just the Conservative Party that continues this misinformation the Labour Party support and perpetuate the exact same theory

Germanshepherdsmum

For as long as I pay taxes I shall refer to taxpayers’ money, as I suspect will most other taxpayers. We are not all as stupid as you evidently think Maizie.

Call it whatever you like, GSM but it will never make it fund spending.

I don't use that language neither do many I know because of its associations with complaining and moaning about supporting vulnerable people of many kinds.

So I dont agree "most other taxpayers".

For as long as I pay taxes I shall refer to taxpayers’ money, as I suspect will most other taxpayers. We are not all as stupid as you evidently think Maizie.

Why do you think it is that, not just the governing party, but, as far as I can see, all of our political parties keep referring to "taxpayers' money"?

It's habit, varian, it's Thatcher's pronouncement that 'there's no such thing as state money, only taxpayer's money' and it's the fact that few people have bothered to trace the source of the money in the economy.

It's also a massively convenient political cover for not increasing, or even cutting, state expenditure for political purposes. Few people argue with the concept of 'taxpayer's money because they believe that that is how the state gets its revenue so they accept ludicrous concepts such as 'austerity' without question.

But the few who have painstakingly examined and analysed government accounting and the law relating to government spending and its relationship to the Bank of England have concluded that without a doubt, government spending comes before taxation and that spending is not dependent on tax revenues.

No need to read it all, just the introduction or conclusion, which, as in all good essays, say the same thing..

www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/bartlett_public_purpose/files/the_self-financing_state_an_institutional_analysis_of_government_expenditure_revenue_collection_and_debt_issuance_operations_in_the_united_kingdom.pdf

I have searched and searched but I haven't found critique of this paper; let alone one which disputes its findings.

In the past two decades the government has 'created' and issued some £900billion of money through quantitative easing; the purchase of treasury bonds on the bond market to release money into the economy. It has had little appreciable adverse effect on the domestic economy; in fact, during the covid crisis it kept the economy afloat . It didn't come from the tax payer and it doesn't have to be repaid by 'the taxpayer' because it wasn't borrowed, it was created.

In fact, the government has always created money into the economy because if the amount the economy had was finite individuals' share of it would become smaller and smaller as the population increases and as people spent it, or stashed it away, or invested it, overseas.

Ironically, for those who wish to cling to the 'taxation funds spending' myth, the more money the state creates into the economy, the more it will get back via taxation...

I do understand that the Government doesn’t get its John Bull printing set out, Maizie. Figure of speech. You really don’t need to spend time explaining what I already know.

Your reply to varian will be interesting.

I am interested in your various posts on Government spending not being related to taxation MaizieD

Why do you think it is that, not just the governing party, but, as far as I can see, all of our political parties keep referring to "taxpayers' money"?

Germanshepherdsmum

I don’t think anyone is saying that doctors shouldn’t have a pay rise - just not 35%.

It's a 35% claim (which we know they won't get, but it's a starting point for bargaining) which covers an estimated 26% real terms cut in salary over 13 years and 9% to compensate for current inflation.

Germanshepherdsmum

*Maizie*, do you seriously believe that everything can be solved by just printing more money - without an increased flow of taxes into the Treasury to underpin it? 35% for the doctors, whatever the ambulance staff want, increases in benefits etc etc etc?

They don't 'print it', GSM. With your deep knowledge of banking you should know that. It's just numbers keyed in on a computer keyboard.

Nothing 'underpins' money, it's a medium of exchange that is taken on trust

Here's the Bank of England again:

^money in the modern economy is an IOU that everyone in the economy trusts. Because everyone trusts in money, they
are happy to accept it in exchange for goods and services —
it can become universally acceptable as the medium of
exchange.^

As the state is the only creator of our money it is the only source of our money (apart from foreign earnings, which make up a small part of our money). The state can only tax after it has issued money. If it taxed without issuing money most of the finite amount of money in the economy would eventually end up back with state and there would be very little left for people to live on...

When the state puts money into the domestic economy, by investment in state services or by directly paying state employees the more it puts in, the more economic activity there is, GDP is increased and the amount returned to the state via taxation increases. 13 years of cutting state spending has shown the truth of this, if nothing else.

The only bar to state spending is a lack of resources available for purchase. You cannot say that the UK lacks resources to purchase when our infrastructure is crumbling and public services are stretched to the limit or being cut.

Her's the Bank of England again on the sources of GDP

Household spending forms the biggest part, accounting for about two thirds of GDP.

www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/what-is-gdp

The source of the household spending is ultimately state issued money. It really doesn't matter if it comes directly from the state or via loans from banks. It's all money, it's all trusted, and increasing the amount of money in circulation will not impair its value in any way and it doesn't need taxation to underpin it. If the state cuts the amount of money it puts into the economy GDP grows more sluggishly or falls.

Nobody worries about banks creating money for new loans, their only 'underpinning is what the state puts into reserves and the understanding that the loans will be repaid. Why worry about the government doing it to pay its employees when we know it will return to it through taxation?

I am not trying to be patronising. I am trying to explain my thinking and its sources.

I don’t think anyone is saying that doctors shouldn’t have a pay rise - just not 35%.

I have two sons who work in the private sector. They haven’t had their pay held down over the last ten/twelve years. In fact they’ve both done very well and I’m very pleased about that, but why should their sister not have her pay keep up with inflation just because she worked in the public sector

I don’t really understand why anyone would think it’s okay to hold down the pay of doctors so that other doctors could be employed. Does that mean that doctors should fund, by reduced pay, the NHS employing more doctors? Of course we need more doctors, but I can’t quite get my head around the idea that other doctors should pay for them.

Anyway more doctors isn’t going to happen whilst the country is bleeding doctors in their thousands to other countries. My own daughter is one of those doctors. I’m not proud of her abandoning her country, but I don’t blame her. She works fewer hours in New Zealand for about the same money. For a parent of three young children, that’s quite important. Doctors have personal lives as well as the rest of us.

But virtually every single person who works for a living has suffered a real terms cut in pay and the cost in living increase from the single parent on a zero hours contract , the OAP who has no chance of increasing their income, upwards. Doctors and nurses and teachers are no more worse off than as a result of COL than anyone else