New Consultant Contracts

donaghs

Any thought on the new Consultants contracts negotiations?

It looks like the latest indepent recommendation is a 37 hour week, and the basic salary is up from €200,000 to €216,000. I presume the €40,000 bonus remains (or has increased).

Not bad eh?

tallaght01

A decent salary, but not amazing when you consider:

The stress of the job.

How competitive it is to reach that position in the first place.

The fact that they'll have put in a MINIMUM of 10 years of 100 hour weeks for relatively poor pay during their 20s and 30s, when most people are having the most social years of their lives.

The fact that you're responsible for the care of your patients 24 hours a day.

The potential for litigation.

These are not amazing conditions, considering what most of these guys could have earned had they gone into the world of law/accounting/business etc

donaghs

I think this ground has been covered many times before, but its worth responding. I do agree that full-time public sector doctors be paid more than the national average due to the stress of the job, the skill required and the need to retain skilled staff, etc. Perhaps a salary like or a little more than the Taoiseach or a top civil servant? It is after all being paid from our taxes.

tallaght01 wrote:

A decent salary, but not amazing when you consider:
The stress of the job.

37 hours is less than many office workers required minimum hours. This should help reduce stress.

tallaght01 wrote:

The fact that they'll have put in a MINIMUM of 10 years of 100 hour weeks for relatively poor pay during their 20s and 30s, when most people are having the most social years of their lives.

I don't recall this issue ever being raised by consultants as being a problem, or as part of the reasoning behind their conditions. I think they want more money, less hours is an added bonus.
I think you are referring to the problems being faced by junior doctors. Shouldn't someone raise this issue in public with politicians etc and try and get this changed?

tallaght01 wrote:

The potential for litigation.

True but having the taxpayer take care of a lot of the liability does take a lot of the sting of out this. (and rightly so - it would be impossible for a doctor to do their job if they were liable for anything that went wrong).

tallaght01 wrote:

These are not amazing conditions, considering what most of these guys could have earned had they gone into the world of law/accounting/business etc

I don't mean this is a bad way, but there is the old saying, if you don't like it...
As far as I can see there are still huge numbers of students desperatly trying to get places Medicine degree places. Also no doctors I know have any intention of leaving their job. And apart from a guy I know who successfuly setup his own business, the doctors I know around my own age are some of the few people who can afford a 3 bedroom house around d4/d6.

2Scoops

The stress factor and is largely overstated.

Also, the earning potential of junior doctors may be relatively low; but relative to what exactly? Senior doctors? Even the lawyers and accountants you envy so much start on basic pay scales that are exceeded by junior doctors. Now, of course, there are exceptions to that rule but if every doctor became a lawyer or accountant instead, I suspect over 90% would make less money in their twenties and thirties than if they were a doctor instead.

donaghs

Interesting point. Slightly off topic of course, coz consultants pay is a separate issue, and the I've never heard the consultants raise this issue. What a junior doctor earn generally?

In the documentary on the junior doctors in Vincents Hospital I think one person mentioned the figure of €60,000 annually. I'd like clarification on this, but not bad for a first job?

In a Dail debate between Harney and John Gormley in 06, Harney said in reference to Junior Doctors: "On a 55 hour week, the earnings of a senior house officer stand at €104,000 while those on the special register stand at €152,000". I get the impression she is being disingenuous here, these may be "senior" junior doctors, and she's may be factoring in bonus and overtime pay. Can anyone clarify this?

And of course the average industrial wage in Ireland is €32,000 a year.

Vorsprung

donaghs wrote: »

Interesting point. Slightly off topic of course, coz consultants pay is a separate issue, and the I've never heard the consultants raise this issue. What a junior doctor earn generally?

In the documentary on the junior doctors in Vincents Hospital I think one person mentioned the figure of €60,000 annually. I'd like clarification on this, but not bad for a first job?

In a Dail debate between Harney and John Gormley in 06, Harney said in reference to Junior Doctors: "On a 55 hour week, the earnings of a senior house officer stand at €104,000 while those on the special register stand at €152,000". I get the impression she is being disingenuous here, these may be "senior" junior doctors, and she's may be factoring in bonus and overtime pay. Can anyone clarify this?

And of course the average industrial wage in Ireland is €32,000 a year.

The intern pay scales are available on the IMO website. Basic for an intern is i think 33k now. What is rises to depends on overtime worked.

You are correct in saying that those salaries you mentioned include overtime. I'm a final med student, and we've heard from interns that effectively, you're earning about €10 an hour, so those big salaries aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Traumadoc

The problem is that many registrars are now going straight into private practice now as there has essentially been an embargo on consultant jobs for the last year. The pay is better and you are your own boss.
It may turn into the Australian system where the public system has to entice consultants to work with very large salaries. I know of one hospital that had to double consultant salaries to prevent the hospital from closing

nesf

donaghs wrote: »

In the documentary on the junior doctors in Vincents Hospital I think one person mentioned the figure of €60,000 annually. I'd like clarification on this, but not bad for a first job?

60K looks great until you see the hours they are working. You can earn similar sums in the private sector very early in your career, you'll just be worked very hard for it.

Personally, I can't see why people would have issues with a junior doctor earning 60K, they definitely earn it. Now generic civil servants on the other hand..

Wishbone Ash

donaghs wrote: »

I think one person mentioned the figure of €60,000 annually. I'd like clarification on this, but not bad for a first job?

A teenage prison officer nearly earns that amount and that's with no 3rd level qualifications!

nesf

Wishbone Ash wrote: »

A teenage prison officer nearly earns that amount and that's with no 3rd level qualifications!

That's another very tough job.

Traumadoc

donaghs wrote: »

Any thought on the new Consultants contracts negotiations?

It looks like the latest indepent recommendation is a 37 hour week, and the basic salary is up from €200,000 to €216,000. I presume the €40,000 bonus remains (or has increased).

Not bad eh?

The 40k bonus was bogus, there was no mention of it in the proposed contract put forward by the HSE.
Essentially it was put out in the media to look like the consultants were been offered 250k, so they would look greedy when they rejected the initial contract- it was all about spin.

tallaght01

It's very easy for2scoops to say that the stress factor is overstated. It's just something that can slip off the tongue if you've never been there.

I presume 2scoops has never been the most senior person in charge of a neonatal unit at 4am when twins are born at 25 weeks gestation with no heart rate, while the other 12 babies on life support are trying to die at the same time.

I presume he has never told a child they have terminal cancer.

I presume he has never had to get a central line into somebody who's life depends on it, when every other senior doc in the hospital has failed.

He's never had a person start bleeding to death during an operation, and had to find the source and stop it in a matter of minutes.

He's never had to tell a family that their mum died during routine surgery that he was performing.

Last weekend I called my consultant in from home. A 5 year old was partially decapitated by a truck. He had to tell the family.

It's a damn stressful job.

It's difficult to answer Donagh's points, as they're all a bit disjointed. But he seems to be relating working hours to the stress. I don't think that's the case. I think the stress is related to what you have to deal with.

I think Donaghs is getting confused with the issues of junior doctors' hours. That's not an issue per se in the negotiations. The consultants aren't arguing that our hours should be reduced. that's already in hand. It is happening gradually. The point I was making was that they have had to put in a lot of hours of training to get where they are. You have to pay people appropriately for their expertise.
The point donaghs made about liability isn't really true. If someone sues the hospital, the hospital pays. If someone sues a doc, the doc pays. Thats why we pay a fortune in medial insurance. The taxpayer does not fund this.
I would argue that the taxpayer gets a very good deal out of the average doctor over the course of his/her career.

As for the old chestnut "if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen etc". I would say that's a really odd response to an industrial relations issue. Surely you can't be advocating that anybody who is unhappy with their conditions should leave their job, rather than arguing for fair treatment. Does that logic apply to everyone? or just us pampered fat cats? Does it apply to people working in sweat shops, for example? Or migrant workers on less than the minimum wage?
The other point in relation to that is that we are. Many docs are getting "out of the kitchen" and doing private work. But the public are unappy with this also. It's a no-win situation.

My take on the whole situation is that people should be entitled to do what they want in their free time. I can't think of any other profesion where you could just tell people that they have to stop doing private work, and would only be compensated for this by having their public sector salaries increased by a tiny proportion of what their private income was. It's very very unfair. I don't know how anyone thinks it's fair. But the public like seeing the politicians taking us docs on, coz we're all golf-playing, veal-guzzling fat cats who dont give a toss about the smelly plebs we treat.

Finally, throwing figures around for the earnings of junior docs is irrelevant. Your salary changes every year. A "junior doctor" in Harney's examples are everything from interns to very senior docs with 15 yers experience on the day before they become a consultant. Some of these docs are working 100 hours a week for the salaries quoted.

2Scoops

You presume incorrectly. I worked as a doctor in Irish hospitals for over 6 years.

It's easy to use emotive examples like those above to exaggerate the stress factor to someone on the outside but I know that while it's certainly not pleasant, people learn to detach themselves to an extent and deal with it. Hence, arguing that the stress of the job is somehow unbearable is untrue.

You expect to be well paid for it. Fine. Just don't overstate your case. There are lots of jobs that are stressful and I know your answer to this is to pay them well too. That's fine as well, if not naive. But if you expect to be paid more compared to other people's salaries then there will be a never-ending cycle of increases. How much more than the humble paper-boy will you need to be paid before you feel your stress is adequately recompensed?

Traumadoc

Where are you working now?

2Scoops

I left medicine permanently. And not because of the stress. Or, indeed, the money

tallaght01

you worked in medicine for 6 years?

So I presumed correctly that you haven't had to do most of the things listed above?

Plus I never argued that the stress was "unbearable". Simply that 250k isn't an outrageous amount of money for what consultants actually deal with.

Traumadoc

Why did you leave?

donaghs

Its an almost pointless discussion trying to agree on whats acceptable money. But in the end of the day the limit has to be set somewhere. I have nothing against doctors and like any sane person am glad they're around.

I believe the Gardai have restrictions on what work they can do in their free-time. Similar rules should also be brought in for Solicitors - e.g. recent property scandals. I take back what I said about anyone being paid as much as the Taoiseach. His recent pay rise is out of proportion for the size of our country, our tax base, and his achievements since his last pay rise.