How Much Should Doctors Be Paid?

 by Henry Ball and Nikhil Patel

The National Health Service is the largest employer in the country, employing over 1.3 million people. Whether they be doctors, nurses or wider healthcare workers they all fall under the umbrella of the NHS. In recent times, due to the pandemic and the current government, the discussion of the pay of doctors has become a prevalent subject.

Doctors' pay varies depending on a number of factors, whether it be specialty, tenure or location. The average GP makes approximately 62 to 94 thousand pounds per annum, with the average surgeon being upwards of 90 thousand; However, this tends to be after doctors are fully qualified which according to the BMA is a minimum of 10 years including medical school. In that time, a doctor will spend two years as a junior doctor (foundation years) and 3 to ten years doing core and specialty training. These extra levels of required training to reach the illustrious levels of being a consultant or GP, means that the career path for doctors takes longer than most other professions. This leads to the argument that for so many training years and high hours, doctors are paid very little.

These lengthy training years and low pay are gruelling. There is no other way of putting it. Junior doctors have heavy expectations put upon them, making decisions of life and death in harsh settings. In ‘doctor turned comedian’ Adam Kay’s book ‘this is going to hurt’, Kay paints a brutal picture of the realities of being a junior doctor. Kay worked in obstetrics and gynaecology (lovingly known by doctors as ‘twats and brats’). He writes comediacally about some of the gruesome things he witnessed, sometimes sugar coating them so that it makes you double take and consider whether what you read is actually funny and not horrifying.

One of the most harrowing parts of the book is when at the end Kay describes what led him to inevitably leave medicine. A patient who was treated by Kay suddenly suffered from a ‘placental abduction’, causing her child to be stillborn. No suffering can compare to that of the mother in that moment, but spare a thought for the young Adam Kay. A patient entrusts their own life and the life of their child to you and through no fault of your own the child dies. At the time there was no consultant on the ward therefore making Kay the most senior doctor on the ward. Kay was forced to make a compromise which to the average person would be inconceivable. To choose between the life of a mother or her unborn child.

As mentioned before, Kay quit medicine after this. There was no incentive to continue, whether it be financial nor the drive to continue. Kay is one of 4% of doctors who leave the profession everywhere according to the General Medical Council. This is an average of over 4000 doctors leaving the profession a year. This is a worrying trend since there is already a shortage of doctors in the country.This is a problem for numerous reasons which we hear about on the news every week (long waiting lists, people unable to get appointments etc.).

This puts the question of pay front and centre. Because with so many doctors leaving the profession it makes you question what incentives there are to stay. In 2016 Junior doctors across the country went on strike due to the contracts given to them. In summary, the salary of a junior doctor was slashed to 23 thousand pounds a year, and in essence it was made so that it was cheaper to have junior doctors work on the weekend. At the time there were 55 thousand junior doctors, therefore approximately a third of the NHS doctors would have held the right to strike, bringing the service to its knees.

One could argue that it is what they signed up for, and the supposedly lucrative rewards of the later career make up for any possible struggles during foundation and training years. But these people tend  not to be doctors or be related to doctors. As illustrated to us by Adam Kay, the gore and decisions doctors must make must have a high price. Professions such as banking bring certain levels of risk, but it is miniscule compared to the risks doctors may have to take for the health of their patients. We are hardly experts on public health and doctor wellbeing but there are a few things we can be certain of: the number of doctors is decreasing, job satisfaction is at an all time low, and all of this has a detrimental effect on the service which we have become accustomed to. We take the NHS for granted, empty claps and cheers, whilst nice gestures, are ultimately worthless. What is worth something is a proper paycheck to help those who sacrifice up to a decade of their life for what is a public service, whether it be helping people through medical school or paying them more, early on in their career. Sure, one could argue that private practice solves most of these problems, but what happens if we sacrifice the institution that has helped almost everyone since 1946, that has stood steadfast during times of crisis, and has been a shelter for the sick and ill no matter creed, colour or sexual orientation. If we are forced to do that then surely we join the league of ordinary nations, and then the public ultimately loses out, and everything doctors sacrificed in the beginning counts for nothing.