The government needs to be more proactive in relation to the crisis happening in our healthcare system (NHS bosses urge Steve Barclay to accept Acas role in dispute with junior doctors, 12 April). Junior doctors are instrumental to fixing the crisis. They progress to being the leaders of services and systems in the future, and at present recognise the disparity between themselves and other equivalent professional salaries and work-life experiences. They carry much debt (funding five or six university years), and there is no doubt that pay has been eroded. The job is also harder, carries more risk and is often less professionally satisfying than 10 years ago. Is this reflective of current government ideology, or poor central decision-making?
I suggest that consultants are adequately remunerated, but the junior tiers are not, and the current situation is highly detrimental to the future of healthcare.
Dr Sara Motion
NHS paediatric consultant
• My child is a doctor, and I wish they weren’t. I have spent the last six years watching them coming close to being broken mentally and physically by punishing rotas, lack of support, workloads, too much responsibility too early, Covid and more. They are bright, personable and committed, and I am sure they are a good doctor. But it makes me sad to think that this is how they have spent their 20s. I don’t think it has to be like this.
As a former HR professional, I have been in despair at the way young doctors are treated as ward fodder rather than humans. If something doesn’t change, my child’s generation of doctors will be burned out before their careers ever really get going.
Name and address supplied
• An 18-year-old school leaver taking a job on minimum wage will earn £262,475 in 13 years. A medical student of the same age will earn nothing for five years and run up £46,250 of tuition fees. A newly qualified junior doctor will draw £280,208 basic salary in their first eight years of work. It is only during the 13th year after leaving school that the doctor exceeds the earnings of the minimum wage earner. Perhaps the British Medical Association should hold out for minimum wage and no tuition fees?
Dr Tony France
Retired consultant physician
• The secret consultant (11 April) says that as a result of the junior doctors’ strike, patients will die, “and yet the government must ultimately hold the responsibility here. Without the steady erosion of services and working conditions over many years we would not have been led to this point.”
The same is true of the criminal justice system. For the first time since I started as a barrister more than 40 years ago, vulnerable people – defendants and victims – have had their trials cancelled because there are no barristers to conduct them as a result of the shocking decline in pay and working conditions. There is a clear pattern to this government’s wrecking of once efficient publicly funded professions. It is unforgivable.
Paul Keleher KC
London
• The government’s argument for scrapping the cap on bankers’ pay was that they operated in an international labour market and that it was important to retain their skills in the UK. How curious that the same argument has not been applied to junior doctors and nurses.
Professor emeritus Nick Gould
Bath
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