thank you for covering this- whenever i mention the underpay of doctors to my family and friends they shoot it down and say ‘doctors are paid bucket loads of money that they don’t deserve’ & it really annoys me😭😭
Ask them directly! Ask how much 'bucketloads' actually is, and why we don't deserve 'it', however much 'it' is - I've made a video where I show my payslip, you can ask them to directly look at it and see whether they think I deserve it or not. Might be a fun experiment!
@@OllieBurtonMed Greetings from America. IMO, showing them your pay amount wouldn't get through to them. You'd have to have them shadow you for a solid week. I don't think most people who work normal 40 hour weeks have any real understanding of just how grueling it is to put in 60+ consistently for months or even years on end. And it's not like those hours are just for the over-achievers who love to work, it's EVERYONE. It's essentially built into the programs. That's not even factoring in the stress of being responsible for decisions that could ruin or even end someone's life if you get it wrong.
Maybe we don’t know because we hear little from junior doctors in hospitals, it is usually GP’s, and it seems they get paid around 100k, despite us being unable to see them . I really think we did not know how little you are paid. Actually, I think the whole NHS system is so complex, that few of us understand where on earth all the money goes to. Thank you for explaining so clearly , and no, I don’t think you are entitled, and I think the NHS is mismanaged on purpose so the government can keep sneaking privatisation in.
As a nurse in the NHS I couldn’t agree with you more! The amount of responsibility and pressure on you Doctors especially juniors is extremely undervalued at times and you deserve your weight in gold! Really interesting video! :)
I think Physician Assistants (PA) and Clinical Nurse Practitioners will become more important to team functioning. One advantage; these staff members are permanent, rather than rotating on a 3-6 monthly basis... I do think that the system is incredibly unstable, however, as even PA and CNPs don't take on the same level of responsibility as junior doctors (being On-call, doing 32 hour shifts, managing multiple issues simultaneously). We're very close to a total systemic collapse, due to the perennial years of mistreatment of junior doctors.
@@draculasbridekaren1664 This is the complexity of the issue I think. NPs and PAs are a definite boon to the workforce, but you ultimately need a GP or a consultant to take responsibility and we're training relatively fewer.
@@OllieBurtonMed I honestly wonder what the situation would look like for doctors and other general medical professionals if there was a more straightforward way of moving across professions. Currently if I as a nursing student and soon to be RN, want to move over to the medical side, the closest thing I'm going to get is an ANP unless I want to do a complete other degree. Even then it's going to take me the best part of my life to get to ANP level. I just wonder with the sheer amount of knowledge and skills that medical professionals need to have these days how it might look if the transferable skills from the professions might be used. Not saying one should move straight into consultancy but being able to use skills to move into a position dependant on knowledge might be possible
in us (especially) health care system, the cost is too high (because its open, private insurance majority) but health care provider such as a md, nurse etc. have a good income (higher).. majority in other country that use universal heath care (socialism style), cost of health care cheaper but the care provider not have a good income as in us..
No, Ollie. This shouldn't be controversial. Because you are 100% right. Doctors - and especially junior doctors - are woefully underpaid in the NHS. And this is fast leading to a situation that threatens our entire system of public health. It's an utter outrage that a junior doctor earns less than the manager of a fast food restaurant. Junior doctors are the literal front lines in our healthcare system. If you end up in A&E or need help with a pregnancy or delivery. If you have "routine" issues regarding chronic conditions. You are relying on a junior NHS doctor to make decisions and manage your care. No disrespect to nurses, or cleaners, or porters, or anyone else in the healthcare system - but it is the doctor we rely on to make the right decisions. It's a disgrace that so many young doctors are giving up on medicine as a profession. Its a disgrace that young, UK-trained doctors are moving to Australia or New Zealand. We need to fix this. The number of junior doctors in the UK is not a huge number. We're talking a few thousand graduates every year. And if it takes £10,000 or £20,000 in extra expenditure to keep each of these people healthy, and safe, and rewarded, and committed to medicine - then that's incredibly cheap considering the value they provide. If junior doctors need help sticking with their profession, please let us know where that money might best be spent. Is it help repaying student loans? Is it help with professional expenses? Is it help getting into into the housing market? Is it all of the above? There are ways of finding this money. Britain is a rich country, with many, many incredibly rich individuals, businesses, and institutions. All of whom take advantage of the services provided by the NHS - and its small army of junior doctors.
people can't afford their services as is fuck these greedy complaining rich doctors.robots will replace them km an engineer and thats my life goal to get ride of human greed in the medical field
@@electri2024 thats life dude its not just the medical profession its everyone thats why demanding more money is selfish and delusional you shouldnt get rich from being a docter you dont invent anything its an occupation same with lawyers
I'm glad doctors are discussing this issue it's quite disturbing how much work doctors put and how little pay there's in it... I'm not sure how people are still getting into medicine so little reward for all the hard work
@@joys8634 The US does not pay big bank. A primary care doc makes 250k, a pediatrician less than 200k. While thats a decent living, considering many have 250-500k school debt, dont begin seeing this kind of pay till their 30s, and often work 60-80hrs per week its truly not enough.
I could hear the hurt and frustration in your voice and I completely stand with you. It take so much sacrifice to specialise in the medical profession and takes a huge toll. There should be compensation that reflects this sacrifice. I’m only 6 months out of uni and I’m tired of still having to spend my weekends and evenings studying compared to my non medic friends. It’s a cycle that never ends and I’m honestly reconsidering my options before my 20s pass me by unfulfilled.
Thanks for this video, it's really comprehensive. As a first year med student, I was previously aware of the calls for a 'pay rise' but otherwise oblivious as to the reality of the situation. This video has helped me better understand and really just furthered my interest in wanting to study this side of medicine more - the working conditions for healthcare staff, the politics, and holding the government to account.
Good luck with holding anyone to account! Courts really are owned by corporates. GMC is business, not regulated itself at all. No one notices f regulatory lawyers lie about Hcps' FTP. They believe the monopoly: GMC. Tragic for Drs, nurses, social workers who are honest.
Read and contribute to drafting regulatory law which is written by the Law Commission. Don't let lawyers take over regulation with lawyers' own perspectives, hcps are needed to contribute to law around regulation. Do law when you get the chance would be my advice.
Thanks for covering this topic. I think it can be hard to be able to portray to people outside of the field that doctors are simply not paid enough in this country. The end salary for a consultant sounds great but that’s years of hard graft and dedicating your life to your career. It’s even harder for doctors from working class backgrounds to stand up about salaries because there’s a sense of guilt about complaining about a salary above minimum wage. I’ve even thought (very) briefly about joining the armed forces as a doctor because the pay is so much better, like starting on >£50k as an FY1! But that’s not something I’d want to do and I shouldn’t have to do something that drastic to be paid what I’m worth.
@@masternobody1896 Good for you - we unfortunately live in a world where 99.9% of people do need an income. I have rent and bills to pay, people have partners and children to support. It's very noble to work for free, but not very practical.
@@OllieBurtonMed I doubt MASTER nobody is a doctor or even has a job. Something else to mention is that plan 2 student loans have really fucked everyone over, especially the working class. My debt is 93k after working for over a year (started at 91k after graduation lol). So in addition to the sub-inflation pays rises i.e. pay cuts, I can also expect to have an additional 9% of my income deducted for the entirety of my career. Fuck me for being born into a poor family eh.
I have spent 6 years of my prime 20s rigorously studying for a degree to help others, I had so much potential in school to do anything else really. Now, nearing my 30s, I can't afford to even rent a place on my own, cant afford hospital parking prices because why have staff parking, lets make them pay, cant afford taking days off when im sick, rotated every year to different location across the country like a pawn, never able to settle down, living pay check to pay check with a ton of student debt. And all of this for what? because we were people who had a degree of empathy and wanted a career around it, only to be exploited heinously by this country. No other country disrespects their doctors like the UK. Fun fact: a newly graduated physician associate with a 2 year degree, earns more than I do, 6 Years of medical school + 3 years of being a junior doctor.
As a resident in the US, I made $45k with 300k in student loan debt. However, once residency was done, I made $350k |(with medical student loan payoff and sign-on bonus) in medical oncology. The problem I have with the UK is that a student would need to lock in their medical education at 16! We don't need to do that until junior (3rd year or 21 years old) in university. It's one track and students are worldly enough to make a life decision in high school. I can be a practicing doctor here but the pay is insulting. I encourage all doctors in the UK to explore other options in medicine in other countries; it's obvious they don't appreciate you here (or at least take for granted). As for people being insulted, they should look at their own lives and see what they contribute to the world. If you don't like your station in life, do something about it. Train in coding and become a developer in tech (starting £60k) for example. The docs here are paid awfully even as a consultant. 15 years in medicine and I made $550k at a prestigious California university. Keep fighting for your rights and if you feel you are undervalued, leave. The NHS will listen. Take the USMLE and move on.
MP’s have just been given a £2,200 pay increase from 1st April!!! On top of the £10,000 increase that they were given to prop up there office, last year. How can we justify £24,000 as a starting salary for a junior doctor with all these responsibilities they have and for a 48 hour working week!! What is your hourly rate??? Disgusting when you put it into perspective. Great video.
Hourly rate for an F1 is £13.88 pre tax, take home £10-11. Except for a small number of specialties, F1 doctors work ~47 hours a week as per their rota (realistically its probably closer to 50), this is because if doctors work >48 hours per week, they have to be paid more as per the junior doctor contract, so it is designed to get as close to the line as possible. For example, in my next job, I am rota'd to work 47 hours and 45 minutes on average per week.
I think your post is spot-on! I work as a primary care doctor in the U.S. and I make about 3 times more than your final level trained doctor (and yes I converted from pounds to USD). I've known several doctors that have repeated a large part of their training (residency 3-7 years duration) so they can practice in the U.S. Without a substantial pay bump you will certainly continue to lose substantial amounts of doctors to other countries and with each doctor that leaves the more work load will build for those that remain. With higher burnout and higher resentment. The U.S and the UK population continues to age and each patient on average is hence older and sicker, you need a young, healthy and motivated health care workforce to care for them.
Really interesting! I am a SCBU nurse, we deal with a lot of junior doctors who deal a large amount of stress working across peads and maternity, alongside our ANNPs. I would never ask to become a doctor, and these insights are interesting as someone who works for the NHS. Fully respect this well put together video.
Fascinating topic that definitely needs to be addressed, I personally can see this issue leading to "brain drain" from the NHS and UK in general, as UK doctors are tempted to seek work in other countries that will provide more competitive salaries. As an international student, I would love to stay in England after graduation but the intensely high tuition fees and relatively low compensation in comparison to other countries make it financially impossible, regardless of how passionately I feel about the NHS.
Honestly Emily I don't blame people anymore. It's unreasonable for people to train to very high standards and then expect all of them to voluntarily stay in a situation where they're perfectly capable of having a better life elsewhere, or at the very least naive.
@@OllieBurtonMed I find it very difficult to comprehend, why the Government are not taking these issues very seriously. We are losing some very good doctors due to this. The medical profession needs to be valued at its utmost. Its as if, it is taken for granted. The way in which the government treat the medical profession, sets a very bad example to the general public, who listen and believe misinformation in the press. Ollie, you need to give evidence at an APPG. This cannot be allowed to continue. I fear for the NHS
@@ellobo4290 1) I didn't go into it for money 2) Wages/conditions can change 3) People can also change their minds! I think it's rather more ludicrous to suggest that just because someone starts a job that they're stuck forever or that they shouldn't want to instigate change. That's a bizarre mentality.
@@sherylpowell7624 The practical answer Sheryl is that the government is instead opting to invest money into upskilling nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician associates (PAs) - both of whom provide very good service without being as expensive as a doctor is. I don't know this model is going to be sustainable long term however when there aren't enough consultants to be responsible for ultimate care.
ER nurse here. Our Physicians have so much responsibility and liability. the emergency department is one of the top areas to be sued. They work grueling hours. Meanwhile they are paying our CEOs ridiculous amounts of money every year. I think the last couple of years has really showcased how valuable and underpaid our staff is. It has also highlighted everything wrong with our crumbling healthcare system. I work at two rural facilities that are now scrambling to find MDs that want to move here. They are panicking because our FEMA nurses contracts are up, and the in house nurses they treated horribly all left to travel. It is such a mess. Thank you for doing such a difficult job. I hope you know how appreciated you are! Thank you for covering a topic that doesn’t get talked about enough.
There is a point at which a spring becomes overstretched. Once that point is reached, the spring is permanently deformed, and can no longer function as a spring. The operator need a new spring... The ex-spring soon figures out that life is better as a wire, and that 'the Master' treats wires better than springs anyway. The ex-spring also realises that even the wires prefer living amongst wires than living with a few springs in their midst... The ex-spring looks on, in dismay, knowing that you need both springs and wires to form an effective machine, but the 'Master' and the wires seem to have ganged up on him. They even call him names for calling-out the obvious problem. Soon, the ex-spring just stops talking, pretending to be a wire, so they'll leave him alone, but he still has 'kinks' that remind the wires that he used to be a spring, but has been beaten into a wire... The story of my life thus far... So many wires, and not enough springs. Running out of springs... Soon, 'the Master' is going to put some of the wires into the furnace, and these wires will be re-shaped into springs, to their shock and dismay, as they will now experience what the springs experienced. But the wires are brittle and will crack apart and fall to pieces... The ex-spring looks on, keeping his head down... It was all so predictable, but the wires just couldn't see it... because 'the Master' treated them better than the springs.
Totally agree with all that you have said . The general public need to know all of this information and realise that it’s not in fact as straight forward as they may think and far more complex than it appears . Excellent interesting content. Many thanks.
Oli good topic to cover and keep them coming, its your honesty that has kept me watching them. I actually just got my offer for Edinburgh Med school today and as a mature student(36) funding is quite a major issue for me, as I dont have a rich background to rely on. Anyway, if it was easy it would be boring and we are not doing this because its fun, so we'll find a way.
I have a few friends in speciality training and some of their exams are £1.4k. Drs have to pay so they can learn to save patient lives. Sometimes the public thinks it only takes 5 years to make a Dr. It takes 5 years and thousands pounds of Drs own salaries and personal lives to create experienced Drs who will look after patients well.
As a rough estimate I'd say 12 years to make a GP and 18-20 to make a medical or surgical consultant. Definitely a very long time compared to most other industries!
It is like 12 to 15 years. In my country, undergraduate medical education is 6 + x years, after internship (foundation year); another 5 + x years is required for residency training depending on the specialty and whether one passes the exams at first sitting or not. The whole process ends up damaging some of us psychologically and most of us are invariably broke during the period.
Sub-specialist from across The Pond here. It’s the challenge and curiosity that gets you. It’s the debt service that keeps you. Fight like hell for your best interests. You have NOTHING to apologize for. No matter how you get to it, NOTHING changes until you say, “NO”!
Hi Ollie - love your channel, and this is an excellent video on a very important topic. I agree with almost everything you've said. I just wanted to pick you up on one thing, though: it simply isn't true that the NHS or its staff must be underfunded to ensure services remain free at the point of use. Government healthcare investment in general has a positive fiscal multiplier (of around 4x), meaning that every £1 the government puts in generates £4 in GDP - in this case by keeping the population healthy and therefore productive. This doesn't directly link to doctor's salaries, but as you and others in the comments have pointed out, the brain-drain and tiering of NHS services based on personal expenses have direct knock-on effects on the nation's health. So by underfunding and underpaying, the government are actually harming the UK economy as well as the efficiency of the service... not to mention the nation's health and the doctors who maintain it. This all fits into a trend of self-defeating reforms (from the perspective of the NHS and the country, rather than private healthcare companies and their investors) which has been going on for decades, as you alluded to. Before marketisation, the NHS was the most efficient healthcare system in the world, largely due to economies of scale, but also due to the absence of profit, hence lack of internal costing and markups, and the associated bureaucracy. Early private contracts actually failed on the basis that private providers needed to charge as much as 40% more than the NHS cost price in order to overcome their internal inefficiencies and make a profit. A really good (if depressing) book on this is NHS Plc. by Dr Allyson Pollock, if you haven't already read it!
Thanks for the in-depth reply Jamie, I have talked about it somewhere in another comment but you're completely correct. I should have specified more that this was a choice that is made, not the *only* way to fund the NHS - other systems such as Aus/Canada etc don't suppress wages in the same way but still work. I will 100% have a look at the book, thanks for the reference!
As a member of the public,i fully agree Doctors are not paid enough. From start to finish...day 1 of Uni/med school to qualification,specialising and beyond. I think more money should be available every step of the way. We couldnt survive without Doctors and other medical staff.
Sing it from the rooftops - at the very least we just need pay restoration to bring us back to match inflation. We need to dispel the myth of greedy doctors, it's just not the case.
@@OllieBurtonMed I personally have never thought of Doctors as being greedy....certainly not an NHS Doctor. You are the beating heart we cannot live without. I will forever be in awe of anyone in this profession.
Im from Australia. When my mum was a nurse in the 1980s she spent many years working for the NHS and they were some of her most formative and best years of her life. fast forward to 2022 and I am in my final year of medical school in Australia. Next year when I enter the workforce as an intern doctor or pgy1, I can expect to make the equivalent of £50,000, near enough double what my NHS counterparts would make and significant payrises occur every year after. For a country with similar living costs, standards of healthcare and responsibilities for Doctors I find this astonishing. There is no wonder that so many medical graduates from the UK end up working in Australia and New Zealand. This is not to brag, only to highlight the injustice. I would love the idea of living in the UK and workin for the NHS as my mother did but not for 50cents on the dollar.
When I had been working as a nurse for about 18 months and my friend was a junior Dr, there was a point in time that I was earning more money than him. We both worked hard, we both had responsibilities in our work but he had to study for a lot longer and was responsible for the care of a lot more patients on each shift. We need to fund our healthcare workers, including our doctors. We are not attracting people in to healthcare and the working conditions are so terrible that keeping people is a challenge. I think we need to have a change, not only to pay but also to the way we support staff. The NHS is a very cheap health service, we can spend more on it and treat everyone better.
Doing Investment Banking will take three years at a top uni in any random subject and you can easily get to 90k gbp first year, second year is well over 100k.
Thanks so much for this Ollie - it's Great someone with an audience like yours has been brave enough to address this issue. You have the support of all your colleagues.
Thank you so much Ollie. This is one of the best videos out there about the reality of being a doctor and should be a much watch for all doctors and med students in the UK. The BMA has been cucking us for time now and I can't wait for doctors to strike. There seems to be a big change in attitudes of trainees and I think that the r/juniordoctor subreddit has done big things to make people realise that doctors deserve better
Money is (unfortunately) a taboo subject and it is great to see you make a video on this matter. It is really shocking how doctors (both juniors and consultants) have had their pay eroded. I am going into graduate medicine in September and will be leaving behind a career in engineering which I started via a graduate scheme on £31,000 a year for 36 hours a week and it is shocking how this salary compares vs junior doctors. Especially considering there is a half-day on Fridays and the company pays for exams and professional certification (chartership/incorporated. The reason the employees have these benefits is because of the Union which is really excellent and it is a shame that the unions which represent doctors aren't doing more to correct the erosion in pay and the work conditions of all doctors.
I’m working as an MD in Norway and it’s interesting to see that we face similar problems (salary vs inflation is one thing, but the consumer price index has increased more than inflation and our salaries, especially during the pandemic). More work for less pay, bucking frilliant
CPI increase is almost always the definition of inflation. There are other ways to measure inflation of course, but less used (e.g., GDP deflator). How do you measure it in Norway?
@@ElPikacupacabra CPI is used to calculate inflation. What I meant was doctors salaries have followed roughly the mean wage growth, but not kept up with cpi/inflation. It’s a mess, just trying to explain it would take like several articles🤷♂️ in short: more expenses, less pay
I quit working as a foundation doctor before even starting. I'm not sacrificing my life anymore for other people/patients for a shit salarty. healthcare is a scam
i am a 3rd year med student nearly going into 4th year and i am also considering this. I'm fed up with being treated like absolute shit by the government.
@@electri2024 also in my 3rd year of med school in London. I am frustrated, I worked to get into med school since I was 16 years old, and now I think it wasn't worth it. I want to start over before it's too late.
@@juliab1879 I have considered, after my 3rd year, I will take a year break and work and explore new fields. In my med school, I get a bachelors of medical science after year 3 so I will use that and see what jobs I can get, if i can’t find anything worth while then I’ll just continue the med degree. I relate to you a lot though. I really wish I did a maths related degree, prefer the subject and it would be way easier, more free time. Feels like I’m losing my youth to this degree for no reason.
In Turkey, we have the same problem. Furthermore our inflation is way worse than Uk. Most of Turkish doctors have started to learn different languages in order to be doctors in other countries having better salaries and circumstances. Good luck for all of us, we deserve better.
Do Investment Banking . It will take three years at a top uni in any random subject and you can easily get to 90k gbp first year, second year is well over 100k.
I'm glad you mentioned other medical workers. I'm a Medical Laboratory Scientist in the US. Most people don't know the amount of education, time, and training that is involved because we are behind the scenes. Physicians depend on us for accurate results so they can diagnose/treat patients. A toilet paper factory worker in the next town over makes a dollar more an hour than I do.
Yh we get fucked, I’ve accepted that I might always be broke doing clinical science. Trying to get enough to do a PhD, might as well try and be real scientist!
I want to add to what you have said rightly. There are certain specialities where you are not allowed/able to do any oncalls becasue you are quite junior and you will entirely rely on your basic salary. Let's take radiology as an example, It is quite competetive and many doctors join this training with 3-4 years of experience. Having said that, most of them have families and comittments by now. Not having those oncalls really makes your salary quite dismal. Some could say but you are not doing oncalls and could do locums (extra hours), but you cannot do for 2 reasons. 1- we are needed to learn every thing to be able to do oncall after 1 year again that is the need of the speciality and people have to make a choice if they could afford this and again this emphasizes your point of class differences. 2- Having to learn the speciality from beginning you need to put aleast 2 hours of study every day. Point is that even training itself is not quite doctor friendly and many other issues which cannot be highlighted at this platform but yeah here we are. Consultant milestone🤲 Thumbs up for the video.
In Ethiopia, Junior doctors are paid 160$ per month, whereas specialist doctors are paid 300$ per month. This is the reason why there are more Ethiopian doctors in one state of the USA than in the whole Ethiopia. This is so sad.
I think this is a calm and excellent video. I would just say that when you add the locum bill for rota gaps, onto patient care issues and long waiting queues witu more complications, I’m not sure the suppressing of doctor pay is the cheapest way to run the NHS. Industrial action is coming.
100% agree Dan, I could have expanded on it better. I don't think suppressing doctor pay is the *only way* to make the NHS work, it's just the particular mechanism that NHS England uses in particular. The Australian NHS functions well by all accounts and it doesn't suppress doctor pay in the same way.
This is a great video, I had an offer for graduate medicine but I felt forced to turn it down when I factored the FY1/FY2 hours, workload and ultimately salary. It's a shame doctors can be making life or death decisions while earning a wage that doesn't reflect the level of responsiblity they shoulder. Sadly I don't see it changing during our lifetime unless we move towards a system of privatised healthcare.
In my country, almost all doctors are underpaid, except for a few specialties. But the worst is for junior doctors and residents. Until you get your specialty you can make almost double if you are working in Lidl (supermarket )
Doctors are underpaid also in Turkey . When I talk about this topic in public, people get angry. But we are truly sacrificing our lives. They do not understand unfortunately.
You're 100% Correct and courageous enough to openly speak about it and put your reputation behind it. Everyone within the Medical Profession agrees with you. For the few who don't right now, in 3 Years with 10%+ Inflation per year with no sign of pay uplift they soon will.
An interesting and heartfelt video. So we know in America Physicians do well, patients suffer. In the UK patients do well, physicians suffer…where is the middle and how are they doing it?
Thanks for speaking up about this. I'm an MRI technologist in America. I understand the health systems are quite different, but I think what you said about how the general population doesn't understand why healthcare costs are so high is extremely applicable universally. It's extremely labor, cost, and skill intensive and many people simply take it for granted in addition to not wanting to pay for it.
I had a MD from a European medical school. I was curious, what options do I have in America? Something a lot easier and faster than being an actual medical doctor (USMLE, residency etc)
@@kamalahmed5057 There's 2 options that come to mind for me off the top of my head in America if you want to provide for patients but don't want to be a doctor. You can do Nurse practitioners or Physician assistant. Both involve direct patient provision but still involve a lot of schooling. At least a bachelor's. You'll still have to do clinical work, but not as long or as intensely as MD or DO.
As an American doctor… this is one of the reasons why I do not support a national healthcare system such as the NHS… I had the equivalent of 150 thousand pounds of student loan debt (200k USD), as a junior dr I earned (57k pounds (75k USD) as a junior doctor (PGY1-6). Once I became an attending physician I was able to pay off my student loan debt because my attending/consultant pay in the US free market system is 320k pounds per year (420k USD). If I did not earn that amount I would never have been able to pay off my student loans and the 20 year journey may have pushed me in a different career field.
I see your point, and I agree that doctors in the UK are underpaid. There are plenty of problems with the NHS - primarily due to underfunding and understaffing - and plenty of reasons to not support a national healthcare system. But you don't support a national healthcare system because if the USA adopted such a system, you might have to stop earning almost ten-times the median salary?! And while attending physicians earn this much, circa 1 million Americans declare bankruptcy every year due to medical bills. Medical bankruptcy is almost unheard of outside of the USA - and yet it accounts (at least in part) for more than 50% of all bankruptcies in the USA. The healthcare system in the USA is inefficient - its global healthcare ranking is mediocre despite spending 50% more on healthcare investment than its closest rival (Norway). The US system is a leaking bucket - pouring dollars in only for them to go to waste. The decentralised fee-paying structure places an enourmous administrative load on the system, requiring huge spending on accounting etc, where a centralised system would be far better placed. Poor investment in effective computing and integrated information systems makes this problem worse still. The system is also largely unregulated, allowing providers to charge more for their services than in other countries - this drives an incentive for superfluous "add-on" treatments and procedures. This lack of regulation also makes mal-practice more difficult to stamp out, and it is estimated that more than 100,000 Americans die from medical mistakes every year - more than car crashes. The USA lags behind other OECD countries: preventable deaths and hospitalisations resulting from ACSCs is 50% higher than the OECD average, life expectancy remains lower than other countries with a similar (or even lower) GDP/capita, suicide rates are higher than similarly developed countries, and the chronic disease burden (obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease) plagues the system. I'm not necessarily advocating for a nationalised healthcare service in the USA, but don't pretend that the system you have is any better just because that system allows you to be paid a huge amount.
@@skyscraper6020 believe me I know the US system is broken, I have been able to carve out a career within different parts of the system navigating and adapting to a lot of nonsense. I’m closer to the end of my career, any changes now will largely affect the next generation of physicians I’m on my way out… I do think changes should be made… I believe in competition and the free market and I do not believe government is very good at running anything let alone healthcare. I believe healthcare should be primarily physician and patient driven with strong consumer protection and oversight but I don’t believe in government being and active manager and provider of healthcare, they always screw it up. Government is not your friend, it doesn’t produce or do anything, it gets in the way of things getting done. I immigrated from a country that controlled everything from education to healthcare. (Mexico) they train the doctors medical education is free. Healthcare is free. It’s also terrible and physicians get paid 30-50k USD per year. Patients get bad care. It just doesn’t work. Government was built by people to provide safety, guarantee liberty, protect individual rights. When it grows and starts providing every good and service, it fails. Big government invariably screws up healthcare. But I was a young 18 year old dual US Mexican citizen, I had a full scholarship for free medical education at the best Mexican medical school. I declined it in favor of a US medical school even though it meant taking on the risk of 200+k is student loan debt… it was a calculated risk based on business common sense. As this world gets smaller, international borders disappear, medical license reciprocity expands, more and more doctors will vote with their feet on which system they want to provide their services in… few with any options will choose a nationalized healthcare system. Makes zero sense for the doctor.
Student loans are the cause. Doctors, lawyers, business persons, dentists, and those who attend professional programs often amass lots of debts because professional programs cost so much. These types of professions are not nearly as lucrative as people presume them to be.
Im training to be a health care professional at the moment and work as a HCA on locum which as a band 2 locum is paid more than a band 5 permanent when i graduate. People are leaving permanent contracts to do locum which is also more expensive for NHS and dangerous when staff arnt secured. The NHS can only run by staff willing to work for way below what we deserve and work for. The amount of training in my own time not paid, paying for staff parking & memberships to practice, working conditions, personal liability, staff shortages, i have faced violence, various other issues that we are expected to take is sometimes not worth it for us. We need better wages or the NHS will not survive. Nurses are leaving to work for supermarkets, its at an all time low. Its very worrying for patients and the country. You are on point with everything you say. I hope BIG changes happen soon or we will be in a even worse situation.
People who train to be doctors are very skilled intelligent people - they could have gone into any other career and earn a lot more money, it is a sad reality that doctors wages are just not competitive enough and what they are paid is no where near a true reflection of their worth! It is just going to leave to a brain drain of the UK doctors who move where their pay reflects their skill and long training. With changes to the student loan systems it only seems to burden future draining doctors further too!!
Unfortunately doctors are exactly the sort of profession that gets hit the hardest by the Plan 2 loans. Any long degree coupled with relatively low earnings for several years (at least relative to the repayment threshold) is a recipe for disaster because by the time your earnings pick up, the interest alone is already too big for you to ever pay off. You're just stuck with a 9% graduate tax for the rest of your life.
Elizabeth you are very correct. and here's the rub, we have now had enough. this isn't "please restore our pay or we will continue to take the thin gruel", this is "restore our pay to what you valued us at during a great recession - namely £47,500, not £28,880", or learn to staff the wards yourself.
I think your TH-cam channel is so underrated as it has such a great quality content unlike the med school click baiters "study with me" content. Keep it up Ollie !
As an American, that title triggered me. I was like... OMG, they're saying even $500k isn't enough!! Medical bills here are so large that I was forced to withdraw from school for a year to pay back a medical bill before they reported it to my credit.
Ollie, this is an excellent video and I will be voting for you in the upcoming council elections. I just want to raise a few other points that you haven’t touched on which makes the pay disparity even worse - many comparator professions are now hybrid WFH with only a couple of days a week in the office or WFH entirely. This allows them to save money on commuting, work multiple jobs on the go, or dedicate a lot of time to side hustles for additional income. Some jobs are also shifting towards full pay for 4 day working weeks and this will become increasingly commonplace and an issue for us in the future where we will be working full pay for 6 days a week - if someone is earning 100% salary for 4 days a week, we should be earning minimum 150% salary for 6 days, not 100%
I suspect outsourcing doctors from abroad is part of the equation along pay 'suppression'. After working for years I realised my relocation in the UK was 'expected'. Most European countries have more doctors per population compared to the UK (and similar pay suppression). I guess the outsourcing will move to the rest of the world.
YESS EXACTLY 😭😭 starting salary for junior doctors in singapore are paid about $3600 SGD per month, equivalent to about 24k pounds annually. insane how much doctors are getting ripped off.
The cost of finishing medical school and starting FY is absolutely immense, I ran out of money at the end of final year. This is because term dates don't always line up with the start of FY1 - me and all my housemates had to rent our place in Coventry for an extra month, AS WELL AS the first month at our new places at the same time just to have somewhere to live. Couple that with not getting paid your F1 wage until the end of August at the very earliest and it's a financial disaster.
@@OllieBurtonMed so frustrating! and as you say means it'll end up being only the wealthy who can afford to stick it out/compete for the most desired spots which is truly the last thing we need in the NHS.... Glad you've found a way to make it work so far, hoping the situation improves ...!
It's beyond disappointing to hear that this would ever be considered controversial Up here in scotland, the issue is less pronounced with the pay being a little bit higher - but also that our student loans have an interest rate of 1.1%, we didn't isolate the hospitals by turning them into foundation trusts, and we didn't push for the stealth privatisation of the components of the NHS It's deeply saddening that strikes are likely but I'll support those who do it to the fullest extent that I can It's not right that you have to go through all that I work in IT, and I work closely with various NHS sites up and down the UK it boils my blood the way things go with everything, but I honestly wasn't very aware of this side of it all 😔
One comment in response to patients who turn to the private system to get healthcare: I don’t think those are fair market costs. Those are artificially inflated costs mostly caused by the fact that healthcare in the UK is decidedly not a free market. I invite you to check out the Surgery Center of Oklahoma in the US. It really does reflect what procedures should cost, and it won’t give you as much sticker shock.
Forced austerity is a big problem. Glad you've identified political solutions to this problem of privatization and the govt forcing austerity to starve the NHS.
As a newly graduated doctor in Syria, I am actually quite shocked to hear such facts about the NHS system, mainly because these same "conditions" of work are also applied in our health care system - albeit to a very extreme extend- as we get paid as residents only 20-30 us dollars, whereas it costs more than 300 to live a somewhat decent life in Syria. That is why it is shocking to see that even well developed countries have the same issues, I think that it mainly comes from the fact that we directly have to handle people lives, therefore any demand to have any kind of a raise or to improve work conditions would be shunned, or even the public would look at it as way to make extra "bucks" out of people agony and pain. In my opinion the best way to make an actual change is to discard of the philanthropic cape of the medical profession that is shown in media, and to treat it as a profession that requires a longer and higher training, and as consequence a better income.
This is great, and we are feeling the same thing in australia. Being at the bottom of the Medical doctor ladder there isnt one there to fight for us, its like everyone pays start increasing and they forget what it was like being first year out with crippling debt struggling to try and put money aside to pay for bills, tests and student loans.
Wild how different UK system is in every way compared to US. Med school here in US is typically 30-60k a year not including loans needed for cost of living. But residents make 50-60k and 300-600k salary after. Also 8 years of school before residency
Thank you for such an insightful video, Oliie! What a sobering video... I had very little understanding about just how significantly underpaid healthcare workers are. Working as a HCA - and soon to be doctor later this year - I was aware of the poor salary but not to the extent that you have detailed here. Of course everyone focuses on the biggest number, e.g., the consultant salary, but as you say, that takes YEARS of life and financial output to achieve - not to mention the hefty tax burden that will accompany such a salary... It will definitely be interesting to see what comes of future strikes if they do happen. Thanks again!
Very welcome Hannah! It's an oddd situation as you say, where the public at large only ever sees the endgame salary of a GP or a consultant. Yet very few industries require 15 years of training in order to get to those sorts of salaries, or indeed working crazy hours for as long as doctors do - it's a bizarre state of affairs that is too often weaponised against doctors.
@@OllieBurtonMed Weaponised against 'junior' doctors. The more senior members of the profession are well-aware of their litany of egregious actions against non-consultant doctors.
My wife left the UK and the NHS to move to New Zealand and marry me. She earns close to $120,000 (62,000 pounds) per year in New Zealand in an emergency department nursing role that is the equivalent to a band 7 role in the UK. This is nearly double the salary of the NHS. UK healthcare salaries are absolutely criminal. Both Doctors and Nurses are highly underpaid over there. It is one of the main stumbling blocks to us ever moving back to the UK. How do you even survive? As a junior doctor you deserve to be paid what you are worth! A minimum of 40,000 pound per year for a first year!
Great video, totally agree. I’m right at the beginning of this process and it is depressing. I’m leaving a job in consulting for 4 more years of university to be paid less than I am now at the end of it for many years afterwards. I’m doing that because it is a vocation, because I want to do something genuinely impactful. That only goes so far towards rent though, pay increases in line with inflation shouldn’t be so controversial. Ah well!
Also you need to look at an hourly rate, here in France Junior doctors make far below minimum wage when you look at hours worked. So yeah doctors can make the double of the average wage (most don't) but they studied twice as long and work generally twice as many hours and none of this is paid as overtime. It is estimated that a medical student by the time he has become a doctor will have saved the French state between 80 000 and 120 000 euros depending on the specialty he chooses.
To be honest, I've been calling doctors arrogant for ages (in spite of being a medic myself), mainly because I do know many almost objectively arrogant doctors. You are certainly not arrogant, not even close. Loved your arguments throughout this video and have certainly convinced me. Good work as always Ollie! :)
Thank you for making this video, but sadly, most of the UK public will not agree. The real value of what doctors’ are worth for the level of responsibility carried is lost on the British populace due to the “free” nature of the NHS. Most people have never had to pay for their own healthcare, so just don’t understand how expensive it really is. I gave up trying to convince anyone of what you’re saying within 5 years of my graduation in 1995. Today, I work in both the NHS and private sector as a Consultant. The NHS will never pay doctors what we are truly worth. As such, I stopped grumbling about it and just make it up with my private work where I can charge what I believe my skills and experience are worth. In the private sector, there is no obligation either way for the doctor or patient if fees cannot be agreed.
I like the point regarding the ‘what aboutism’, seems as though your point is once you get to the graduate level health care professionals, we’re all being underpaid. Not only due to real-terms pay cuts but largely because you only have to look at how much a private Dietitian or Physiotherapist costs and you see the pay disparity between private and NHS rates. I like your points mate, as a Dietitian working in the NHS I totally see your points. Credit to you making the video 👍🏼
28.800 pounds...daaaamm. Dude I got almost 28k in night shift warehouse and I basicly working on autopilot because job isn't hard and I can listen audiobook all night.
Don;t forget the opportunity costs lost of being in education earning nothing or working for a very low salary where someone in another field like accounting, engineering, etc is earning a salary and has less debt. Then add on top of that, the average person does not have to worry that a mistake at their job could injure or kill someone and then the stress of a malpractice suit whether or not it results in ending your career. Even if you are never sued, just imagine the psychological toll of having that possibility pushed off in the back of your mind every time you touch someone.
The point here is about long term talent recruitment and retention, not greediness and pay itself. If we don’t change the situation, eventually nobody would want to work for NHS anymore, and the general public lose out. It’s already happening with mass resignation of nurses.
In Egypt doctors are paid roughly 2500L.E which is 200$+/month .. and then the ministry of health wonders why most new graduates are leaving the country for better opportunities over sea ! I know 2800-3000£/month for an FY2 is VERY low but I'll take it over the 200£ I get in my own country. It's a global issue and we need to start protesting
I'm a junior doctor in India and we are just as worse off. I mean i joined the profession to be of service to people but little did I realize what this service is going to cost me. Seriously the wages of doctors are literal peanuts in the public. healthcare set up. Sure private set ups pull in a lot of money but i know what out of pocket expenses for health can do to people so i really do believe in the need for free health care. But it just means selling myself short continuously. Cab drivers make more than us in some of the Indian states. I now actively discourage people from entering this profession. We are treated as nothing more than slaves here tbh.
Just one thing to point out when discussing medical degrees - there are no 'thirds.' There aren't even low 2:2s - those are not considered good enough to be the end product treating patients.
Great video. So well summarised the heart of the issue in the NHS, I have completed my F2 year and myself and colleagues are taking time out. I'll be doing an F3 and possibly an F4 before doing a GP programme and full locum to be paid closer to free market worth.
Its interesting to see that it's the same problem everywhere. In Uganda, a junior doctor, after taxes, receives a pay of about GBP 340 per month. GBP 4000... Sure, cost of living might be lower here, but to give you an idea of how undervalued that is, even at Uganda's level, as a gig musician, that same pay can be made in 3 weekends, if you're a slightly above average player for example. All after 6 years in Training. And consultants working in the ministry receive a laughable double to that figure. They mostly make their money out of private consultations on a case basis actually because the salary is fixed regardless of the work done in the public healthcare system. It's amazing to be really.
Be authentic, leave if you have to, save yourself, and love your family/ friends. Drs' have annoyed politicians by exposing corruption. Drs can be naive Whistleblowers.
Doctors are unfairly paid in many European countries (eu and non eu). However in the US some make ungodly amounts of money due to accepting kickbacks. I’m talking about cardiologists at my local hospital making $700,000+ per year. It was a big whistleblower scandal
As a NP in the US, I have to say most healthcare providers are severely underpaid. Compare to most other professions, you would have to go through extra years of education post undergrad, accumulating loans, missing years of work, and spend your 20s in school. If you want to make money, just go into finance or computer science where one could easily make six figures without the extra schooling. Not mentioning the immense responsibilty and work related stress.
Sure, but that's probably not a very good long term solution for the NHS. We need to improve conditions here such that people are more inclined to stay
Bless you Ollie for continuing to make videos when you have to read through some of these comments...it's not easy at all. I have a suggestion for a video, you should do an interview with Rebecca Bradford. She has a TH-cam account. She is a UK medical student, mature aged who did the access program. She could provide a lot of insight to people who want to take the non traditional path and she is super inspiring. Best of luck to you lovely man.
“Doomed to be a GP” - ouch! Great video. Worth highlighting, too, that the BMA is escalating its campaign on pay as we speak, and a grassroots campaign originating on Reddit is aiming to push them farther and faster. Momentum is building!
Sorry about the less-than-charitable phrasing - the workload of GP terrifies me. And fingers crossed re the pay campaign and JDUK movement - hopefully gearing up for good things. You're more than welcome to come on interview-style and discuss Dr Elliott!
@@julietcrowson3503 The government has money. We know this because they can magic up huge sums when it's needed, even when huge amounts of it evaporate overnight as we have just seen with the PPE contracts. They elect not to spend it paying NHS staff properly.
@@julietcrowson3503 Taxation, of course. But paying NHS doctors a bit more is a lot cheaper than losing them and then trying to plug the gaps in a failing health service (as is already happening now). This needs long-term thinking that has lately been lacking in workforce planning.
@@talexe the hidden agenda is so much worse than good people think. Neglecting to discuss Drs' pay is a choice, not an oversight. Maybe to test whether Drs do actually emigrate as a result of low pay? Remember lawyers are driving this so they want proof / evidence before making decisions. Many many Drs would have to leave and cost the est. Money and lives for even the smallest change. There is no legal requirement for gov to care because they're lawyers, who don't recognise duty of care towards the public. Lawyers/ politicians recognise duty of care towards their paying clients , i.e. prosecution/regulatory staff, not the public. Public interests are invoked when freedom of interest requests are made to find out what corporations such as GMC, NMC ,hcpc have done wrong - because lawyers are protecting the reputation of : lawyers.
Ollie my auntie works in as a manger as a department in Manchester children’s hospital. I always ask her about her job as it seems she’s got an important role in the hospital. We got to speaking about patient care and how she’s meant to get different type of patients through and seen by doctors. She said that locum doctors are a problem saying that they are able to negotiate for pay ( and due to high demand they’re able to ask for silly wages per hour taking up to 1500 per shift) she goes on say locum doctors also sign on at multiple different hospitals at a time so they won’t even be at a certain hospital and still get payed. She thinks that locum doctors take a lot of money form the NHS that could be spent elsewhere and on top of that it’s dangerous. I said to her maybe the fact that they get payed more might just not actually be that much money taken from NHS per year eg it negligible. I’m in support of increasing all health care worker staff pay, what do you think about her take on locum doctors??
I think that's completely fair enough, locum doctors account for an unbelievable amount of NHS spending - and that amount should tell everyone what a doctor is actually worth, because that is what a doctor *is worth* when they exercise their market value. But the government actively chooses to not employ enough doctors of all grades, and instead spends money elsewhere. Your auntie is absolutely right in her take, and the reality is that locums wouldn't be necessary if the NHS had enough doctors, but it doesn't, so they are, and therefore market forces come into play.
You can't blame an NHS doctor for going locum, you get paid similar salary to doctors outside the UK, and to be honest it should be like that. Less working hours and stress is also a huge reason, taking your own holidays and having family time is important, if only you know the stress and lack of time doctors have with their families.
@@MrClassy1991 Not at all, I have no problems with people going locum, I do it myself regularly! I'm not anti-locum at all. It just amazes me that the NHS opts to keep relying on them rather than staffing with more juniors, I just don't get how the maths works.
thank you for covering this- whenever i mention the underpay of doctors to my family and friends they shoot it down and say ‘doctors are paid bucket loads of money that they don’t deserve’ & it really annoys me😭😭
Ask them directly! Ask how much 'bucketloads' actually is, and why we don't deserve 'it', however much 'it' is - I've made a video where I show my payslip, you can ask them to directly look at it and see whether they think I deserve it or not. Might be a fun experiment!
@@OllieBurtonMed Greetings from America. IMO, showing them your pay amount wouldn't get through to them. You'd have to have them shadow you for a solid week. I don't think most people who work normal 40 hour weeks have any real understanding of just how grueling it is to put in 60+ consistently for months or even years on end. And it's not like those hours are just for the over-achievers who love to work, it's EVERYONE. It's essentially built into the programs.
That's not even factoring in the stress of being responsible for decisions that could ruin or even end someone's life if you get it wrong.
Doctors are not the only one. Nearly all essential workers in the UK are underpaid.
@@dadt8009absolutely they are- this video was about doctors is all:)
Maybe we don’t know because we hear little from junior doctors in hospitals, it is usually GP’s, and it seems they get paid around 100k, despite us being unable to see them .
I really think we did not know how little you are paid.
Actually, I think the whole NHS system is so complex, that few of us understand where on earth all the money goes to.
Thank you for explaining so clearly , and no, I don’t think you are entitled, and I think the NHS is mismanaged on purpose so the government can keep sneaking privatisation in.
As a nurse in the NHS I couldn’t agree with you more! The amount of responsibility and pressure on you Doctors especially juniors is extremely undervalued at times and you deserve your weight in gold! Really interesting video! :)
Doctors are too overworked and it’s insane the amount of bullshit the have to put up with.
I think Physician Assistants (PA) and Clinical Nurse Practitioners will become more important to team functioning. One advantage; these staff members are permanent, rather than rotating on a 3-6 monthly basis... I do think that the system is incredibly unstable, however, as even PA and CNPs don't take on the same level of responsibility as junior doctors (being On-call, doing 32 hour shifts, managing multiple issues simultaneously). We're very close to a total systemic collapse, due to the perennial years of mistreatment of junior doctors.
Well at least the Kardashians are doing well. 🙄 😶
@@draculasbridekaren1664 This is the complexity of the issue I think. NPs and PAs are a definite boon to the workforce, but you ultimately need a GP or a consultant to take responsibility and we're training relatively fewer.
@@OllieBurtonMed I honestly wonder what the situation would look like for doctors and other general medical professionals if there was a more straightforward way of moving across professions. Currently if I as a nursing student and soon to be RN, want to move over to the medical side, the closest thing I'm going to get is an ANP unless I want to do a complete other degree. Even then it's going to take me the best part of my life to get to ANP level. I just wonder with the sheer amount of knowledge and skills that medical professionals need to have these days how it might look if the transferable skills from the professions might be used. Not saying one should move straight into consultancy but being able to use skills to move into a position dependant on knowledge might be possible
As a US resident, it’s really interesting to hear about challenges you guys face in other health systems. Best of luck to you all!
We're catching up fast with the US!
God help us
God help America's drug problems too...all part of a plot to weaken the W?
Weaken the W?
@@Skepticalstudent45 the health of the W EST to make them to week to defend
in us (especially) health care system, the cost is too high (because its open, private insurance majority) but health care provider such as a md, nurse etc. have a good income (higher).. majority in other country that use universal heath care (socialism style), cost of health care cheaper but the care provider not have a good income as in us..
As a junior resident doctor in India, working 24hrs a week at a government hospital, we only get ₹48,000/month($628/€571). as of march 2022.
No, Ollie. This shouldn't be controversial. Because you are 100% right. Doctors - and especially junior doctors - are woefully underpaid in the NHS. And this is fast leading to a situation that threatens our entire system of public health.
It's an utter outrage that a junior doctor earns less than the manager of a fast food restaurant.
Junior doctors are the literal front lines in our healthcare system. If you end up in A&E or need help with a pregnancy or delivery. If you have "routine" issues regarding chronic conditions. You are relying on a junior NHS doctor to make decisions and manage your care. No disrespect to nurses, or cleaners, or porters, or anyone else in the healthcare system - but it is the doctor we rely on to make the right decisions.
It's a disgrace that so many young doctors are giving up on medicine as a profession. Its a disgrace that young, UK-trained doctors are moving to Australia or New Zealand.
We need to fix this. The number of junior doctors in the UK is not a huge number. We're talking a few thousand graduates every year. And if it takes £10,000 or £20,000 in extra expenditure to keep each of these people healthy, and safe, and rewarded, and committed to medicine - then that's incredibly cheap considering the value they provide.
If junior doctors need help sticking with their profession, please let us know where that money might best be spent. Is it help repaying student loans? Is it help with professional expenses? Is it help getting into into the housing market? Is it all of the above?
There are ways of finding this money. Britain is a rich country, with many, many incredibly rich individuals, businesses, and institutions. All of whom take advantage of the services provided by the NHS - and its small army of junior doctors.
people can't afford their services as is fuck these greedy complaining rich doctors.robots will replace them km an engineer and thats my life goal to get ride of human greed in the medical field
@@MegaGuitarplayer92 Medicaine isn't about health, anyway. It's about getting people on pills $$$
@@MegaGuitarplayer92 lol, why dont you try and sacrifice your youth and dedicate your entire lives to a profession only to make a salary of £28000
@@electri2024 thats life dude its not just the medical profession its everyone thats why demanding more money is selfish and delusional you shouldnt get rich from being a docter you dont invent anything its an occupation same with lawyers
@@MegaGuitarplayer92 we save lives and sacrifice our own youth , is that not worth something ?
I'm glad doctors are discussing this issue it's quite disturbing how much work doctors put and how little pay there's in it... I'm not sure how people are still getting into medicine so little reward for all the hard work
This is only his country lmao. USA pays big bank
@@joys8634 i think usa is the one of the few exceptions to the rule because most countries are having the same issue
@@joys8634 The US does not pay big bank. A primary care doc makes 250k, a pediatrician less than 200k. While thats a decent living, considering many have 250-500k school debt, dont begin seeing this kind of pay till their 30s, and often work 60-80hrs per week its truly not enough.
@@joys8634 Not for every specialty and all of them have large amounts of med school debt. They still pay better than almost every country though
@@joys8634 Not for every specialty and all of them have large amounts of med school debt. They still pay better than almost every country though
I could hear the hurt and frustration in your voice and I completely stand with you. It take so much sacrifice to specialise in the medical profession and takes a huge toll. There should be compensation that reflects this sacrifice. I’m only 6 months out of uni and I’m tired of still having to spend my weekends and evenings studying compared to my non medic friends. It’s a cycle that never ends and I’m honestly reconsidering my options before my 20s pass me by unfulfilled.
Thanks for this video, it's really comprehensive. As a first year med student, I was previously aware of the calls for a 'pay rise' but otherwise oblivious as to the reality of the situation. This video has helped me better understand and really just furthered my interest in wanting to study this side of medicine more - the working conditions for healthcare staff, the politics, and holding the government to account.
Good luck with holding anyone to account!
Courts really are owned by corporates. GMC is business, not regulated itself at all. No one notices f regulatory lawyers lie about Hcps' FTP. They believe the monopoly: GMC.
Tragic for Drs, nurses, social workers who are honest.
Read and contribute to drafting regulatory law which is written by the Law Commission. Don't let lawyers take over regulation with lawyers' own perspectives, hcps are needed to contribute to law around regulation.
Do law when you get the chance would be my advice.
Thanks for covering this topic. I think it can be hard to be able to portray to people outside of the field that doctors are simply not paid enough in this country. The end salary for a consultant sounds great but that’s years of hard graft and dedicating your life to your career. It’s even harder for doctors from working class backgrounds to stand up about salaries because there’s a sense of guilt about complaining about a salary above minimum wage.
I’ve even thought (very) briefly about joining the armed forces as a doctor because the pay is so much better, like starting on >£50k as an FY1! But that’s not something I’d want to do and I shouldn’t have to do something that drastic to be paid what I’m worth.
It does seem a lot to ask people to be shot at to be paid fairly.
@@OllieBurtonMed i dont care if i get paid. i do it for my patience
@@masternobody1896 Good for you - we unfortunately live in a world where 99.9% of people do need an income. I have rent and bills to pay, people have partners and children to support. It's very noble to work for free, but not very practical.
@@OllieBurtonMed I doubt MASTER nobody is a doctor or even has a job. Something else to mention is that plan 2 student loans have really fucked everyone over, especially the working class. My debt is 93k after working for over a year (started at 91k after graduation lol). So in addition to the sub-inflation pays rises i.e. pay cuts, I can also expect to have an additional 9% of my income deducted for the entirety of my career. Fuck me for being born into a poor family eh.
@@masternobody1896 You mean your patients? 😳
I have spent 6 years of my prime 20s rigorously studying for a degree to help others, I had so much potential in school to do anything else really. Now, nearing my 30s, I can't afford to even rent a place on my own, cant afford hospital parking prices because why have staff parking, lets make them pay, cant afford taking days off when im sick, rotated every year to different location across the country like a pawn, never able to settle down, living pay check to pay check with a ton of student debt. And all of this for what? because we were people who had a degree of empathy and wanted a career around it, only to be exploited heinously by this country. No other country disrespects their doctors like the UK. Fun fact: a newly graduated physician associate with a 2 year degree, earns more than I do, 6 Years of medical school + 3 years of being a junior doctor.
This is going to be a key sticking point for negotiations - junior docs should be at least Band 7 AFC equivalent, if not more.
As a resident in the US, I made $45k with 300k in student loan debt. However, once residency was done, I made $350k |(with medical student loan payoff and sign-on bonus) in medical oncology. The problem I have with the UK is that a student would need to lock in their medical education at 16! We don't need to do that until junior (3rd year or 21 years old) in university. It's one track and students are worldly enough to make a life decision in high school. I can be a practicing doctor here but the pay is insulting. I encourage all doctors in the UK to explore other options in medicine in other countries; it's obvious they don't appreciate you here (or at least take for granted). As for people being insulted, they should look at their own lives and see what they contribute to the world. If you don't like your station in life, do something about it. Train in coding and become a developer in tech (starting £60k) for example. The docs here are paid awfully even as a consultant. 15 years in medicine and I made $550k at a prestigious California university. Keep fighting for your rights and if you feel you are undervalued, leave. The NHS will listen. Take the USMLE and move on.
A lot of doctors in the NHS are already exploring this option. Many have moved to Australia, Canada & the Middle East.
Doing Investment Banking will take three years at a top uni in any random subject and you can easily get to 100k gbp first year
As an American medical student, I can’t thank you enough for this video. I had no idea how stuck you were as an NHS trainee.
MP’s have just been given a £2,200 pay increase from 1st April!!! On top of the £10,000 increase that they were given to prop up there office, last year.
How can we justify £24,000 as a starting salary for a junior doctor with all these responsibilities they have and for a 48 hour working week!!
What is your hourly rate??? Disgusting when you put it into perspective. Great video.
Hourly rate for an F1 is £13.88 pre tax, take home £10-11. Except for a small number of specialties, F1 doctors work ~47 hours a week as per their rota (realistically its probably closer to 50), this is because if doctors work >48 hours per week, they have to be paid more as per the junior doctor contract, so it is designed to get as close to the line as possible. For example, in my next job, I am rota'd to work 47 hours and 45 minutes on average per week.
I think your post is spot-on! I work as a primary care doctor in the U.S. and I make about 3 times more than your final level trained doctor (and yes I converted from pounds to USD). I've known several doctors that have repeated a large part of their training (residency 3-7 years duration) so they can practice in the U.S. Without a substantial pay bump you will certainly continue to lose substantial amounts of doctors to other countries and with each doctor that leaves the more work load will build for those that remain. With higher burnout and higher resentment. The U.S and the UK population continues to age and each patient on average is hence older and sicker, you need a young, healthy and motivated health care workforce to care for them.
Well I am glad you got into medicine for the money 💰
@@charleskidney4279 yes doctors are when no money r/iamverysmart
Really interesting! I am a SCBU nurse, we deal with a lot of junior doctors who deal a large amount of stress working across peads and maternity, alongside our ANNPs. I would never ask to become a doctor, and these insights are interesting as someone who works for the NHS. Fully respect this well put together video.
Fascinating topic that definitely needs to be addressed, I personally can see this issue leading to "brain drain" from the NHS and UK in general, as UK doctors are tempted to seek work in other countries that will provide more competitive salaries. As an international student, I would love to stay in England after graduation but the intensely high tuition fees and relatively low compensation in comparison to other countries make it financially impossible, regardless of how passionately I feel about the NHS.
Honestly Emily I don't blame people anymore. It's unreasonable for people to train to very high standards and then expect all of them to voluntarily stay in a situation where they're perfectly capable of having a better life elsewhere, or at the very least naive.
@@OllieBurtonMed I find it very difficult to comprehend, why the Government are not taking these issues very seriously. We are losing some very good doctors due to this. The medical profession needs to be valued at its utmost. Its as if, it is taken for granted. The way in which the government treat the medical profession, sets a very bad example to the general public, who listen and believe misinformation in the press. Ollie, you need to give evidence at an APPG. This cannot be allowed to continue. I fear for the NHS
@@OllieBurtonMed Because they knew this going into it! my god if you just became a doctor for the money itd be better you didnt
@@ellobo4290 1) I didn't go into it for money
2) Wages/conditions can change
3) People can also change their minds!
I think it's rather more ludicrous to suggest that just because someone starts a job that they're stuck forever or that they shouldn't want to instigate change. That's a bizarre mentality.
@@sherylpowell7624 The practical answer Sheryl is that the government is instead opting to invest money into upskilling nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician associates (PAs) - both of whom provide very good service without being as expensive as a doctor is. I don't know this model is going to be sustainable long term however when there aren't enough consultants to be responsible for ultimate care.
ER nurse here. Our Physicians have so much responsibility and liability. the emergency department is one of the top areas to be sued. They work grueling hours. Meanwhile they are paying our CEOs ridiculous amounts of money every year.
I think the last couple of years has really showcased how valuable and underpaid our staff is. It has also highlighted everything wrong with our crumbling healthcare system.
I work at two rural facilities that are now scrambling to find MDs that want to move here. They are panicking because our FEMA nurses contracts are up, and the in house nurses they treated horribly all left to travel. It is such a mess.
Thank you for doing such a difficult job. I hope you know how appreciated you are! Thank you for covering a topic that doesn’t get talked about enough.
There is a point at which a spring becomes overstretched. Once that point is reached, the spring is permanently deformed, and can no longer function as a spring. The operator need a new spring... The ex-spring soon figures out that life is better as a wire, and that 'the Master' treats wires better than springs anyway. The ex-spring also realises that even the wires prefer living amongst wires than living with a few springs in their midst... The ex-spring looks on, in dismay, knowing that you need both springs and wires to form an effective machine, but the 'Master' and the wires seem to have ganged up on him. They even call him names for calling-out the obvious problem. Soon, the ex-spring just stops talking, pretending to be a wire, so they'll leave him alone, but he still has 'kinks' that remind the wires that he used to be a spring, but has been beaten into a wire...
The story of my life thus far... So many wires, and not enough springs. Running out of springs... Soon, 'the Master' is going to put some of the wires into the furnace, and these wires will be re-shaped into springs, to their shock and dismay, as they will now experience what the springs experienced. But the wires are brittle and will crack apart and fall to pieces... The ex-spring looks on, keeping his head down... It was all so predictable, but the wires just couldn't see it... because 'the Master' treated them better than the springs.
Extremely well said, especially considering how tricky it is to speak about this topic without getting backlash!
Totally agree with all that you have said . The general public need to know all of this information and realise that it’s not in fact as straight forward as they may think and far more complex than it appears . Excellent interesting content. Many thanks.
Oli good topic to cover and keep them coming, its your honesty that has kept me watching them. I actually just got my offer for Edinburgh Med school today and as a mature student(36) funding is quite a major issue for me, as I dont have a rich background to rely on. Anyway, if it was easy it would be boring and we are not doing this because its fun, so we'll find a way.
Congrats- Just heard back and got an offer today too! Best of luck man
Very well done, good luck to you . I am 36 as well and just awaiting an answer from one of my choices
I hope you're able to fund your journey and enjoy it I'm a student at Edinburgh and its well worth it!
Excellent video Ollie. You've put everything fairly and with strong reasoning. The message needs to be spread!
I have a few friends in speciality training and some of their exams are £1.4k. Drs have to pay so they can learn to save patient lives. Sometimes the public thinks it only takes 5 years to make a Dr. It takes 5 years and thousands pounds of Drs own salaries and personal lives to create experienced Drs who will look after patients well.
As a rough estimate I'd say 12 years to make a GP and 18-20 to make a medical or surgical consultant. Definitely a very long time compared to most other industries!
It is like 12 to 15 years. In my country, undergraduate medical education is 6 + x years, after internship (foundation year); another 5 + x years is required for residency training depending on the specialty and whether one passes the exams at first sitting or not. The whole process ends up damaging some of us psychologically and most of us are invariably broke during the period.
Sub-specialist from across The Pond here. It’s the challenge and curiosity that gets you. It’s the debt service that keeps you. Fight like hell for your best interests. You have NOTHING to apologize for. No matter how you get to it, NOTHING changes until you say, “NO”!
Hi Ollie - love your channel, and this is an excellent video on a very important topic. I agree with almost everything you've said. I just wanted to pick you up on one thing, though: it simply isn't true that the NHS or its staff must be underfunded to ensure services remain free at the point of use. Government healthcare investment in general has a positive fiscal multiplier (of around 4x), meaning that every £1 the government puts in generates £4 in GDP - in this case by keeping the population healthy and therefore productive. This doesn't directly link to doctor's salaries, but as you and others in the comments have pointed out, the brain-drain and tiering of NHS services based on personal expenses have direct knock-on effects on the nation's health. So by underfunding and underpaying, the government are actually harming the UK economy as well as the efficiency of the service... not to mention the nation's health and the doctors who maintain it.
This all fits into a trend of self-defeating reforms (from the perspective of the NHS and the country, rather than private healthcare companies and their investors) which has been going on for decades, as you alluded to. Before marketisation, the NHS was the most efficient healthcare system in the world, largely due to economies of scale, but also due to the absence of profit, hence lack of internal costing and markups, and the associated bureaucracy. Early private contracts actually failed on the basis that private providers needed to charge as much as 40% more than the NHS cost price in order to overcome their internal inefficiencies and make a profit. A really good (if depressing) book on this is NHS Plc. by Dr Allyson Pollock, if you haven't already read it!
Thanks for the in-depth reply Jamie, I have talked about it somewhere in another comment but you're completely correct. I should have specified more that this was a choice that is made, not the *only* way to fund the NHS - other systems such as Aus/Canada etc don't suppress wages in the same way but still work.
I will 100% have a look at the book, thanks for the reference!
As a member of the public,i fully agree Doctors are not paid enough. From start to finish...day 1 of Uni/med school to qualification,specialising and beyond. I think more money should be available every step of the way. We couldnt survive without Doctors and other medical staff.
Sing it from the rooftops - at the very least we just need pay restoration to bring us back to match inflation. We need to dispel the myth of greedy doctors, it's just not the case.
@@OllieBurtonMed I personally have never thought of Doctors as being greedy....certainly not an NHS Doctor. You are the beating heart we cannot live without. I will forever be in awe of anyone in this profession.
Im from Australia. When my mum was a nurse in the 1980s she spent many years working for the NHS and they were some of her most formative and best years of her life. fast forward to 2022 and I am in my final year of medical school in Australia. Next year when I enter the workforce as an intern doctor or pgy1, I can expect to make the equivalent of £50,000, near enough double what my NHS counterparts would make and significant payrises occur every year after. For a country with similar living costs, standards of healthcare and responsibilities for Doctors I find this astonishing. There is no wonder that so many medical graduates from the UK end up working in Australia and New Zealand. This is not to brag, only to highlight the injustice. I would love the idea of living in the UK and workin for the NHS as my mother did but not for 50cents on the dollar.
You start on 100K AUSD ? Wow
When I had been working as a nurse for about 18 months and my friend was a junior Dr, there was a point in time that I was earning more money than him.
We both worked hard, we both had responsibilities in our work but he had to study for a lot longer and was responsible for the care of a lot more patients on each shift.
We need to fund our healthcare workers, including our doctors. We are not attracting people in to healthcare and the working conditions are so terrible that keeping people is a challenge.
I think we need to have a change, not only to pay but also to the way we support staff.
The NHS is a very cheap health service, we can spend more on it and treat everyone better.
Doing Investment Banking will take three years at a top uni in any random subject and you can easily get to 90k gbp first year, second year is well over 100k.
Thanks so much for this Ollie - it's Great someone with an audience like yours has been brave enough to address this issue. You have the support of all your colleagues.
Thank you so much Ollie. This is one of the best videos out there about the reality of being a doctor and should be a much watch for all doctors and med students in the UK. The BMA has been cucking us for time now and I can't wait for doctors to strike. There seems to be a big change in attitudes of trainees and I think that the r/juniordoctor subreddit has done big things to make people realise that doctors deserve better
I hear you Ollie...
ST7 - battered , bruised , humiliated ....sucked in ...spat out...over worked and squeezed way past breaking point....
Money is (unfortunately) a taboo subject and it is great to see you make a video on this matter. It is really shocking how doctors (both juniors and consultants) have had their pay eroded. I am going into graduate medicine in September and will be leaving behind a career in engineering which I started via a graduate scheme on £31,000 a year for 36 hours a week and it is shocking how this salary compares vs junior doctors. Especially considering there is a half-day on Fridays and the company pays for exams and professional certification (chartership/incorporated. The reason the employees have these benefits is because of the Union which is really excellent and it is a shame that the unions which represent doctors aren't doing more to correct the erosion in pay and the work conditions of all doctors.
It's political. Lawyers decided they don't like 'gobby' doctors...exposing dishonesty and corruption in lawyers
I was a nurse for 38yrs . Ollie I think you should be be paid more as a junior doctor you have alot of responsibility and work long hours .
Thanks for your service Michael, I'm sure your patients appreciated you!
I’m working as an MD in Norway and it’s interesting to see that we face similar problems (salary vs inflation is one thing, but the consumer price index has increased more than inflation and our salaries, especially during the pandemic). More work for less pay, bucking frilliant
CPI increase is almost always the definition of inflation. There are other ways to measure inflation of course, but less used (e.g., GDP deflator). How do you measure it in Norway?
@@ElPikacupacabra
CPI is used to calculate inflation.
What I meant was doctors salaries have followed roughly the mean wage growth, but not kept up with cpi/inflation. It’s a mess, just trying to explain it would take like several articles🤷♂️ in short: more expenses, less pay
I quit working as a foundation doctor before even starting. I'm not sacrificing my life anymore for other people/patients for a shit salarty. healthcare is a scam
i am a 3rd year med student nearly going into 4th year and i am also considering this. I'm fed up with being treated like absolute shit by the government.
@@electri2024 also in my 3rd year of med school in London. I am frustrated, I worked to get into med school since I was 16 years old, and now I think it wasn't worth it. I want to start over before it's too late.
@@juliab1879 I have considered, after my 3rd year, I will take a year break and work and explore new fields. In my med school, I get a bachelors of medical science after year 3 so I will use that and see what jobs I can get, if i can’t find anything worth while then I’ll just continue the med degree.
I relate to you a lot though. I really wish I did a maths related degree, prefer the subject and it would be way easier, more free time. Feels like I’m losing my youth to this degree for no reason.
In Turkey, we have the same problem. Furthermore our inflation is way worse than Uk. Most of Turkish doctors have started to learn different languages in order to be doctors in other countries having better salaries and circumstances. Good luck for all of us, we deserve better.
Yes, you’re absolutely right.
As someone on the route of becoming a doctor I thank you for this. No one ever wants to talk about this.
Do Investment Banking . It will take three years at a top uni in any random subject and you can easily get to 90k gbp first year, second year is well over 100k.
I'm glad you mentioned other medical workers. I'm a Medical Laboratory Scientist in the US. Most people don't know the amount of education, time, and training that is involved because we are behind the scenes. Physicians depend on us for accurate results so they can diagnose/treat patients. A toilet paper factory worker in the next town over makes a dollar more an hour than I do.
Yh we get fucked, I’ve accepted that I might always be broke doing clinical science. Trying to get enough to do a PhD, might as well try and be real scientist!
I want to add to what you have said rightly. There are certain specialities where you are not allowed/able to do any oncalls becasue you are quite junior and you will entirely rely on your basic salary. Let's take radiology as an example, It is quite competetive and many doctors join this training with 3-4 years of experience. Having said that, most of them have families and comittments by now. Not having those oncalls really makes your salary quite dismal. Some could say but you are not doing oncalls and could do locums (extra hours), but you cannot do for 2 reasons.
1- we are needed to learn every thing to be able to do oncall after 1 year again that is the need of the speciality and people have to make a choice if they could afford this and again this emphasizes your point of class differences.
2- Having to learn the speciality from beginning you need to put aleast 2 hours of study every day.
Point is that even training itself is not quite doctor friendly and many other issues which cannot be highlighted at this platform but yeah here we are. Consultant milestone🤲
Thumbs up for the video.
This is spot on Ollie. You could not have said it any better. It hurts so much. I sincerely hope that things will change with time
In Ethiopia, Junior doctors are paid 160$ per month, whereas specialist doctors are paid 300$ per month. This is the reason why there are more Ethiopian doctors in one state of the USA than in the whole Ethiopia. This is so sad.
The situation is the same in most African countries sir, quite sad.
I think this is a calm and excellent video. I would just say that when you add the locum bill for rota gaps, onto patient care issues and long waiting queues witu more complications, I’m not sure the suppressing of doctor pay is the cheapest way to run the NHS. Industrial action is coming.
100% agree Dan, I could have expanded on it better. I don't think suppressing doctor pay is the *only way* to make the NHS work, it's just the particular mechanism that NHS England uses in particular. The Australian NHS functions well by all accounts and it doesn't suppress doctor pay in the same way.
This is a great video, I had an offer for graduate medicine but I felt forced to turn it down when I factored the FY1/FY2 hours, workload and ultimately salary. It's a shame doctors can be making life or death decisions while earning a wage that doesn't reflect the level of responsiblity they shoulder. Sadly I don't see it changing during our lifetime unless we move towards a system of privatised healthcare.
In my country, almost all doctors are underpaid, except for a few specialties. But the worst is for junior doctors and residents. Until you get your specialty you can make almost double if you are working in Lidl (supermarket )
Doctors are underpaid also in Turkey . When I talk about this topic in public, people get angry. But we are truly sacrificing our lives. They do not understand unfortunately.
You're 100% Correct and courageous enough to openly speak about it and put your reputation behind it. Everyone within the Medical Profession agrees with you. For the few who don't right now, in 3 Years with 10%+ Inflation per year with no sign of pay uplift they soon will.
Doctors are overpaid.
An interesting and heartfelt video. So we know in America Physicians do well, patients suffer. In the UK patients do well, physicians suffer…where is the middle and how are they doing it?
I stand with you, Ollie! Not much else to say apart from you have my support. Doctors should get paid far more than they do.
Thanks for speaking up about this. I'm an MRI technologist in America. I understand the health systems are quite different, but I think what you said about how the general population doesn't understand why healthcare costs are so high is extremely applicable universally. It's extremely labor, cost, and skill intensive and many people simply take it for granted in addition to not wanting to pay for it.
I had a MD from a European medical school. I was curious, what options do I have in America? Something a lot easier and faster than being an actual medical doctor (USMLE, residency etc)
@@kamalahmed5057 There's 2 options that come to mind for me off the top of my head in America if you want to provide for patients but don't want to be a doctor. You can do Nurse practitioners or Physician assistant. Both involve direct patient provision but still involve a lot of schooling. At least a bachelor's. You'll still have to do clinical work, but not as long or as intensely as MD or DO.
@@Chrono826 I have a M.D. and a BSc
@@kamalahmed5057 Oh ok I'm sorry I'm not sure how exactly it would transfer over.
@@Chrono826 I would feel low being a PA
As an American doctor… this is one of the reasons why I do not support a national healthcare system such as the NHS… I had the equivalent of 150 thousand pounds of student loan debt (200k USD), as a junior dr I earned (57k pounds (75k USD) as a junior doctor (PGY1-6). Once I became an attending physician I was able to pay off my student loan debt because my attending/consultant pay in the US free market system is 320k pounds per year (420k USD). If I did not earn that amount I would never have been able to pay off my student loans and the 20 year journey may have pushed me in a different career field.
I see your point, and I agree that doctors in the UK are underpaid. There are plenty of problems with the NHS - primarily due to underfunding and understaffing - and plenty of reasons to not support a national healthcare system. But you don't support a national healthcare system because if the USA adopted such a system, you might have to stop earning almost ten-times the median salary?! And while attending physicians earn this much, circa 1 million Americans declare bankruptcy every year due to medical bills. Medical bankruptcy is almost unheard of outside of the USA - and yet it accounts (at least in part) for more than 50% of all bankruptcies in the USA.
The healthcare system in the USA is inefficient - its global healthcare ranking is mediocre despite spending 50% more on healthcare investment than its closest rival (Norway). The US system is a leaking bucket - pouring dollars in only for them to go to waste. The decentralised fee-paying structure places an enourmous administrative load on the system, requiring huge spending on accounting etc, where a centralised system would be far better placed. Poor investment in effective computing and integrated information systems makes this problem worse still. The system is also largely unregulated, allowing providers to charge more for their services than in other countries - this drives an incentive for superfluous "add-on" treatments and procedures. This lack of regulation also makes mal-practice more difficult to stamp out, and it is estimated that more than 100,000 Americans die from medical mistakes every year - more than car crashes.
The USA lags behind other OECD countries: preventable deaths and hospitalisations resulting from ACSCs is 50% higher than the OECD average, life expectancy remains lower than other countries with a similar (or even lower) GDP/capita, suicide rates are higher than similarly developed countries, and the chronic disease burden (obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease) plagues the system.
I'm not necessarily advocating for a nationalised healthcare service in the USA, but don't pretend that the system you have is any better just because that system allows you to be paid a huge amount.
@@skyscraper6020 believe me I know the US system is broken, I have been able to carve out a career within different parts of the system navigating and adapting to a lot of nonsense. I’m closer to the end of my career, any changes now will largely affect the next generation of physicians I’m on my way out… I do think changes should be made… I believe in competition and the free market and I do not believe government is very good at running anything let alone healthcare. I believe healthcare should be primarily physician and patient driven with strong consumer protection and oversight but I don’t believe in government being and active manager and provider of healthcare, they always screw it up. Government is not your friend, it doesn’t produce or do anything, it gets in the way of things getting done. I immigrated from a country that controlled everything from education to healthcare. (Mexico) they train the doctors medical education is free. Healthcare is free. It’s also terrible and physicians get paid 30-50k USD per year. Patients get bad care. It just doesn’t work. Government was built by people to provide safety, guarantee liberty, protect individual rights. When it grows and starts providing every good and service, it fails. Big government invariably screws up healthcare. But I was a young 18 year old dual US Mexican citizen, I had a full scholarship for free medical education at the best Mexican medical school. I declined it in favor of a US medical school even though it meant taking on the risk of 200+k is student loan debt… it was a calculated risk based on business common sense. As this world gets smaller, international borders disappear, medical license reciprocity expands, more and more doctors will vote with their feet on which system they want to provide their services in… few with any options will choose a nationalized healthcare system. Makes zero sense for the doctor.
Student loans are the cause. Doctors, lawyers, business persons, dentists, and those who attend professional programs often amass lots of debts because professional programs cost so much. These types of professions are not nearly as lucrative as people presume them to be.
Im training to be a health care professional at the moment and work as a HCA on locum which as a band 2 locum is paid more than a band 5 permanent when i graduate. People are leaving permanent contracts to do locum which is also more expensive for NHS and dangerous when staff arnt secured. The NHS can only run by staff willing to work for way below what we deserve and work for. The amount of training in my own time not paid, paying for staff parking & memberships to practice, working conditions, personal liability, staff shortages, i have faced violence, various other issues that we are expected to take is sometimes not worth it for us. We need better wages or the NHS will not survive. Nurses are leaving to work for supermarkets, its at an all time low. Its very worrying for patients and the country. You are on point with everything you say. I hope BIG changes happen soon or we will be in a even worse situation.
All absolutely correct.
28k after a decade of studying. Damn. Doing Investment Banking takes three years at a top uni in any random subject and you can easily get to 100k.
You have to be intelligent to do investment banking.
Dumbed down British medical students couldn’t stand the pace.
People who train to be doctors are very skilled intelligent people - they could have gone into any other career and earn a lot more money, it is a sad reality that doctors wages are just not competitive enough and what they are paid is no where near a true reflection of their worth! It is just going to leave to a brain drain of the UK doctors who move where their pay reflects their skill and long training. With changes to the student loan systems it only seems to burden future draining doctors further too!!
Unfortunately doctors are exactly the sort of profession that gets hit the hardest by the Plan 2 loans. Any long degree coupled with relatively low earnings for several years (at least relative to the repayment threshold) is a recipe for disaster because by the time your earnings pick up, the interest alone is already too big for you to ever pay off. You're just stuck with a 9% graduate tax for the rest of your life.
Elizabeth you are very correct. and here's the rub, we have now had enough. this isn't "please restore our pay or we will continue to take the thin gruel", this is "restore our pay to what you valued us at during a great recession - namely £47,500, not £28,880", or learn to staff the wards yourself.
I think your TH-cam channel is so underrated as it has such a great quality content unlike the med school click baiters "study with me" content. Keep it up Ollie !
As an American, that title triggered me. I was like... OMG, they're saying even $500k isn't enough!! Medical bills here are so large that I was forced to withdraw from school for a year to pay back a medical bill before they reported it to my credit.
Ollie, this is an excellent video and I will be voting for you in the upcoming council elections. I just want to raise a few other points that you haven’t touched on which makes the pay disparity even worse - many comparator professions are now hybrid WFH with only a couple of days a week in the office or WFH entirely. This allows them to save money on commuting, work multiple jobs on the go, or dedicate a lot of time to side hustles for additional income. Some jobs are also shifting towards full pay for 4 day working weeks and this will become increasingly commonplace and an issue for us in the future where we will be working full pay for 6 days a week - if someone is earning 100% salary for 4 days a week, we should be earning minimum 150% salary for 6 days, not 100%
I suspect outsourcing doctors from abroad is part of the equation along pay 'suppression'. After working for years I realised my relocation in the UK was 'expected'. Most European countries have more doctors per population compared to the UK (and similar pay suppression). I guess the outsourcing will move to the rest of the world.
YESS EXACTLY 😭😭 starting salary for junior doctors in singapore are paid about $3600 SGD per month, equivalent to about 24k pounds annually. insane how much doctors are getting ripped off.
Also I wish medical school were more upfront about the fees as F1/2’s! Never heard of it much before now..
The cost of finishing medical school and starting FY is absolutely immense, I ran out of money at the end of final year. This is because term dates don't always line up with the start of FY1 - me and all my housemates had to rent our place in Coventry for an extra month, AS WELL AS the first month at our new places at the same time just to have somewhere to live. Couple that with not getting paid your F1 wage until the end of August at the very earliest and it's a financial disaster.
@@OllieBurtonMed so frustrating! and as you say means it'll end up being only the wealthy who can afford to stick it out/compete for the most desired spots which is truly the last thing we need in the NHS.... Glad you've found a way to make it work so far, hoping the situation improves ...!
*"restoration" is nice wording,* whoever came up w that. _JC
It's beyond disappointing to hear that this would ever be considered controversial
Up here in scotland, the issue is less pronounced with the pay being a little bit higher - but also that our student loans have an interest rate of 1.1%, we didn't isolate the hospitals by turning them into foundation trusts, and we didn't push for the stealth privatisation of the components of the NHS
It's deeply saddening that strikes are likely but I'll support those who do it to the fullest extent that I can
It's not right that you have to go through all that
I work in IT, and I work closely with various NHS sites up and down the UK
it boils my blood the way things go with everything, but I honestly wasn't very aware of this side of it all 😔
You make a lot of good points here. Much respect to you and I hope things get better.
One comment in response to patients who turn to the private system to get healthcare: I don’t think those are fair market costs. Those are artificially inflated costs mostly caused by the fact that healthcare in the UK is decidedly not a free market. I invite you to check out the Surgery Center of Oklahoma in the US. It really does reflect what procedures should cost, and it won’t give you as much sticker shock.
That's very fair, thanks Rufus - it definitely does go both ways, because the market is so restricted here it'll naturally raise costs. Thanks!
You are correct and I agree with you. The current climate in the NHS scares me to the point I am scared to start work
Forced austerity is a big problem. Glad you've identified political solutions to this problem of privatization and the govt forcing austerity to starve the NHS.
As a newly graduated doctor in Syria, I am actually quite shocked to hear such facts about the NHS system, mainly because these same "conditions" of work are also applied in our health care system - albeit to a very extreme extend- as we get paid as residents only 20-30 us dollars, whereas it costs more than 300 to live a somewhat decent life in Syria. That is why it is shocking to see that even well developed countries have the same issues, I think that it mainly comes from the fact that we directly have to handle people lives, therefore any demand to have any kind of a raise or to improve work conditions would be shunned, or even the public would look at it as way to make extra "bucks" out of people agony and pain.
In my opinion the best way to make an actual change is to discard of the philanthropic cape of the medical profession that is shown in media, and to treat it as a profession that requires a longer and higher training, and as consequence a better income.
This is great, and we are feeling the same thing in australia. Being at the bottom of the Medical doctor ladder there isnt one there to fight for us, its like everyone pays start increasing and they forget what it was like being first year out with crippling debt struggling to try and put money aside to pay for bills, tests and student loans.
Wild how different UK system is in every way compared to US. Med school here in US is typically 30-60k a year not including loans needed for cost of living. But residents make 50-60k and 300-600k salary after. Also 8 years of school before residency
Thank you for such an insightful video, Oliie!
What a sobering video...
I had very little understanding about just how significantly underpaid healthcare workers are. Working as a HCA - and soon to be doctor later this year - I was aware of the poor salary but not to the extent that you have detailed here. Of course everyone focuses on the biggest number, e.g., the consultant salary, but as you say, that takes YEARS of life and financial output to achieve - not to mention the hefty tax burden that will accompany such a salary... It will definitely be interesting to see what comes of future strikes if they do happen.
Thanks again!
Very welcome Hannah! It's an oddd situation as you say, where the public at large only ever sees the endgame salary of a GP or a consultant. Yet very few industries require 15 years of training in order to get to those sorts of salaries, or indeed working crazy hours for as long as doctors do - it's a bizarre state of affairs that is too often weaponised against doctors.
If you calculate it by hours worked, you may find that you get paid more as a HCA, with a far less responsibilities.
@@OllieBurtonMed Weaponised against 'junior' doctors. The more senior members of the profession are well-aware of their litany of egregious actions against non-consultant doctors.
My wife left the UK and the NHS to move to New Zealand and marry me. She earns close to $120,000 (62,000 pounds) per year in New Zealand in an emergency department nursing role that is the equivalent to a band 7 role in the UK. This is nearly double the salary of the NHS. UK healthcare salaries are absolutely criminal. Both Doctors and Nurses are highly underpaid over there. It is one of the main stumbling blocks to us ever moving back to the UK. How do you even survive? As a junior doctor you deserve to be paid what you are worth! A minimum of 40,000 pound per year for a first year!
Great video as always Ollie :)
Glad you enjoyed!
I think this is why doctors in the Us join the military. They get their loans paid and still make a pretty good salary.
Very important video. Not at all surprising that the year that doctors' pay stopped rising with inflation was the year the Tories got in.
Mrs T was very isolated at the end of life....
Great video, totally agree. I’m right at the beginning of this process and it is depressing. I’m leaving a job in consulting for 4 more years of university to be paid less than I am now at the end of it for many years afterwards. I’m doing that because it is a vocation, because I want to do something genuinely impactful. That only goes so far towards rent though, pay increases in line with inflation shouldn’t be so controversial. Ah well!
Good luck
Also you need to look at an hourly rate, here in France Junior doctors make far below minimum wage when you look at hours worked. So yeah doctors can make the double of the average wage (most don't) but they studied twice as long and work generally twice as many hours and none of this is paid as overtime. It is estimated that a medical student by the time he has become a doctor will have saved the French state between 80 000 and 120 000 euros depending on the specialty he chooses.
Very true of my experiences as a junior so far - many, many unpaid overtime hours.
So happy you’ve done this!
Respect for doing this video. Much needed!
To be honest, I've been calling doctors arrogant for ages (in spite of being a medic myself), mainly because I do know many almost objectively arrogant doctors. You are certainly not arrogant, not even close. Loved your arguments throughout this video and have certainly convinced me. Good work as always Ollie! :)
I'm sure lots of us are arrogant Bally! We can be both arrogant and underpaid I guess 😅
Thank you for making this video, but sadly, most of the UK public will not agree. The real value of what doctors’ are worth for the level of responsibility carried is lost on the British populace due to the “free” nature of the NHS. Most people have never had to pay for their own healthcare, so just don’t understand how expensive it really is.
I gave up trying to convince anyone of what you’re saying within 5 years of my graduation in 1995. Today, I work in both the NHS and private sector as a Consultant. The NHS will never pay doctors what we are truly worth. As such, I stopped grumbling about it and just make it up with my private work where I can charge what I believe my skills and experience are worth. In the private sector, there is no obligation either way for the doctor or patient if fees cannot be agreed.
Interestingly, this is exactly the situation here in Sweden as well. It's all about delayed gratification...
I like the point regarding the ‘what aboutism’, seems as though your point is once you get to the graduate level health care professionals, we’re all being underpaid. Not only due to real-terms pay cuts but largely because you only have to look at how much a private Dietitian or Physiotherapist costs and you see the pay disparity between private and NHS rates.
I like your points mate, as a Dietitian working in the NHS I totally see your points. Credit to you making the video 👍🏼
In Turkey resident doctors avarage salary is 511£/month, Specialist make between 770-1200£/month.
28.800 pounds...daaaamm. Dude I got almost 28k in night shift warehouse and I basicly working on autopilot because job isn't hard and I can listen audiobook all night.
Don;t forget the opportunity costs lost of being in education earning nothing or working for a very low salary where someone in another field like accounting, engineering, etc is earning a salary and has less debt. Then add on top of that, the average person does not have to worry that a mistake at their job could injure or kill someone and then the stress of a malpractice suit whether or not it results in ending your career. Even if you are never sued, just imagine the psychological toll of having that possibility pushed off in the back of your mind every time you touch someone.
Doctors are underpaid, Teachers are underpaid. It is almost like the government is bad at paying people a fair amount compared to their skills.
The point here is about long term talent recruitment and retention, not greediness and pay itself. If we don’t change the situation, eventually nobody would want to work for NHS anymore, and the general public lose out. It’s already happening with mass resignation of nurses.
In Egypt doctors are paid roughly 2500L.E which is 200$+/month .. and then the ministry of health wonders why most new graduates are leaving the country for better opportunities over sea !
I know 2800-3000£/month for an FY2 is VERY low but I'll take it over the 200£ I get in my own country. It's a global issue and we need to start protesting
I'm a junior doctor in India and we are just as worse off. I mean i joined the profession to be of service to people but little did I realize what this service is going to cost me. Seriously the wages of doctors are literal peanuts in the public. healthcare set up. Sure private set ups pull in a lot of money but i know what out of pocket expenses for health can do to people so i really do believe in the need for free health care. But it just means selling myself short continuously. Cab drivers make more than us in some of the Indian states. I now actively discourage people from entering this profession. We are treated as nothing more than slaves here tbh.
Just one thing to point out when discussing medical degrees - there are no 'thirds.' There aren't even low 2:2s - those are not considered good enough to be the end product treating patients.
Yet 12,000 patients die unnecessarily in NHS hospitals every year as a direct result of basic medical errors.
Great video. So well summarised the heart of the issue in the NHS, I have completed my F2 year and myself and colleagues are taking time out. I'll be doing an F3 and possibly an F4 before doing a GP programme and full locum to be paid closer to free market worth.
Its interesting to see that it's the same problem everywhere. In Uganda, a junior doctor, after taxes, receives a pay of about GBP 340 per month. GBP 4000...
Sure, cost of living might be lower here, but to give you an idea of how undervalued that is, even at Uganda's level, as a gig musician, that same pay can be made in 3 weekends, if you're a slightly above average player for example.
All after 6 years in Training.
And consultants working in the ministry receive a laughable double to that figure. They mostly make their money out of private consultations on a case basis actually because the salary is fixed regardless of the work done in the public healthcare system. It's amazing to be really.
'I'm already a little bit jaded and I've only been working as a Dr for 6 months'... I'm a fourth year and I feel jaded already 😂👌
Be authentic, leave if you have to, save yourself, and love your family/ friends. Drs' have annoyed politicians by exposing corruption. Drs can be naive Whistleblowers.
Current HCSW, aspiring psychiatrist, could not agree more with every word.
Doctors are unfairly paid in many European countries (eu and non eu). However in the US some make ungodly amounts of money due to accepting kickbacks. I’m talking about cardiologists at my local hospital making $700,000+ per year. It was a big whistleblower scandal
As a NP in the US, I have to say most healthcare providers are severely underpaid. Compare to most other professions, you would have to go through extra years of education post undergrad, accumulating loans, missing years of work, and spend your 20s in school. If you want to make money, just go into finance or computer science where one could easily make six figures without the extra schooling. Not mentioning the immense responsibilty and work related stress.
Yes UK doctors are underpaid. That’s why many UK doctors try their best to work in other countries such as USA, Canada, or Australia...
Sure, but that's probably not a very good long term solution for the NHS. We need to improve conditions here such that people are more inclined to stay
Not Australia as they have the same legal system as the UK!!! 👑👑👑👑
Bless you Ollie for continuing to make videos when you have to read through some of these comments...it's not easy at all. I have a suggestion for a video, you should do an interview with Rebecca Bradford. She has a TH-cam account. She is a UK medical student, mature aged who did the access program. She could provide a lot of insight to people who want to take the non traditional path and she is super inspiring. Best of luck to you lovely man.
“Doomed to be a GP” - ouch!
Great video. Worth highlighting, too, that the BMA is escalating its campaign on pay as we speak, and a grassroots campaign originating on Reddit is aiming to push them farther and faster. Momentum is building!
Sorry about the less-than-charitable phrasing - the workload of GP terrifies me. And fingers crossed re the pay campaign and JDUK movement - hopefully gearing up for good things. You're more than welcome to come on interview-style and discuss Dr Elliott!
Where will the £ come from ?
@@julietcrowson3503 The government has money. We know this because they can magic up huge sums when it's needed, even when huge amounts of it evaporate overnight as we have just seen with the PPE contracts. They elect not to spend it paying NHS staff properly.
@@julietcrowson3503 Taxation, of course. But paying NHS doctors a bit more is a lot cheaper than losing them and then trying to plug the gaps in a failing health service (as is already happening now). This needs long-term thinking that has lately been lacking in workforce planning.
@@talexe the hidden agenda is so much worse than good people think. Neglecting to discuss Drs' pay is a choice, not an oversight. Maybe to test whether Drs do actually emigrate as a result of low pay? Remember lawyers are driving this so they want proof / evidence before making decisions. Many many Drs would have to leave and cost the est. Money and lives for even the smallest change. There is no legal requirement for gov to care because they're lawyers, who don't recognise duty of care towards the public. Lawyers/ politicians recognise duty of care towards their paying clients , i.e. prosecution/regulatory staff, not the public. Public interests are invoked when freedom of interest requests are made to find out what corporations such as GMC, NMC ,hcpc have done wrong - because lawyers are protecting the reputation of : lawyers.
So true and so sad that nobody understands this…
Totally agree. It's good to hear an insider view. We need to hear the truth about conditions for doctors.
If you've found it insightful Dize please share it around - the public just doesn't hear about this stuff and I think most would be shocked.
Ollie my auntie works in as a manger as a department in Manchester children’s hospital. I always ask her about her job as it seems she’s got an important role in the hospital. We got to speaking about patient care and how she’s meant to get different type of patients through and seen by doctors. She said that locum doctors are a problem saying that they are able to negotiate for pay ( and due to high demand they’re able to ask for silly wages per hour taking up to 1500 per shift) she goes on say locum doctors also sign on at multiple different hospitals at a time so they won’t even be at a certain hospital and still get payed. She thinks that locum doctors take a lot of money form the NHS that could be spent elsewhere and on top of that it’s dangerous. I said to her maybe the fact that they get payed more might just not actually be that much money taken from NHS per year eg it negligible. I’m in support of increasing all health care worker staff pay, what do you think about her take on locum doctors??
I think that's completely fair enough, locum doctors account for an unbelievable amount of NHS spending - and that amount should tell everyone what a doctor is actually worth, because that is what a doctor *is worth* when they exercise their market value.
But the government actively chooses to not employ enough doctors of all grades, and instead spends money elsewhere. Your auntie is absolutely right in her take, and the reality is that locums wouldn't be necessary if the NHS had enough doctors, but it doesn't, so they are, and therefore market forces come into play.
You can't blame an NHS doctor for going locum, you get paid similar salary to doctors outside the UK, and to be honest it should be like that. Less working hours and stress is also a huge reason, taking your own holidays and having family time is important, if only you know the stress and lack of time doctors have with their families.
@@MrClassy1991 Not at all, I have no problems with people going locum, I do it myself regularly! I'm not anti-locum at all. It just amazes me that the NHS opts to keep relying on them rather than staffing with more juniors, I just don't get how the maths works.