DR MAX: this Insatiable Demand For Higher Doctors' Pay Looks Tawdry > 상담신청

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Junior medical professionals are threatening to strike once again. So what, you might say? When are they not threatening a walk-out? In the past two years, they have taken industrial action 11 times.

This makes me really angry. My medical union, the British Medical Association (BMA), is misusing public respect for medical professionals, mauling facts and pursuing Left-wing crusades with no regard for the cost to the health service.

Their insatiable needs for higher pay make my occupation, my lifelong occupation, look tawdry, negative and money-grubbing. There are moments when I practically feel I could rip up my membership card in aggravation.

But it isn't simply my union that is acting so disgracefully. The genuine offender is the Labour government, whose ineptitude in union negotiations given that pertaining to power has actually activated a greedy free-for-all.

Unless these outrageous needs can be brought under control, I fear the NHS could be bankrupted.

The flashpoint this month is the BMA's need for a pay boost much better than the 4 percent that was implemented on April 1 - an increase the union has actually dismissed as 'derisory'.

That 4 percent is already above the rate of inflation, which is currently running at 3.5 per cent. In truth, the offer used to junior physicians (or 'resident doctors', as we're now supposed to call them) offers considerably more, as they will get an extra ₤ 750 on top of the uplift, representing an average increase in income of 5.4 percent.

And it begins top of a colossal 22 per cent typical rise served up by Health Secretary Wes Streeting last year in a desperate bid to stop the consistent strikes, after they demanded a 30 per cent pay increase.

Their pressing needs for higher pay make my occupation, my lifelong vocation, look tawdry, negative and money-grubbing, states Dr Max Pemberton

Junior doctor members of the British Medical Association (BMA) on the picket line outside the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle in 2023

That craven capitulation by Labour didn't work, of course - simply as surrender has actually shown unsuccessful in mollifying the transportation unions, the teachers and every other militant collective. The BMA justifies its continued push for greater pay by declaring physicians are even worse off by about a quarter in genuine terms given that 2009.

The chairman of the BMA council, Professor Philip Banfield, sneers at the 4 per cent increase, saying it 'takes us in reverse, pressing pay repair even further into the distance,' and includes ominously: 'No one desires a go back to scenes of doctors on picket lines, but sadly this looks even more likely.'

What else did anyone anticipate? Unions are mandated to require as much cash for their members as they can get. They don't exist to be sensible or to embrace compromise. And when Labour shopped them off, the unions noticed weakness. Prof Banfield knows there are more concessions to be won now, more pips to be squeezed.

But the NHS is not some private, profit-making corporation, and this is not a battle between an exploited labor force and fat cat shareholders. Our beleaguered health service is moneyed by all of us - and it is on its knees.

This is something most physicians can identify. Yet, over the previous decade or more, the union has actually been more concerned with pursuing Left-wing agendas than acting in the best interest of its members.

For circumstances, the BMA's management has actually declined to back the Cass Review, commissioned by the NHS as a report into gender identity services for children and young people.

The findings by Dr Hilary Cass, published in 2015, encouraged against hurrying under-18s into gender shift treatment, such as puberty blockers, that they may later regret.

It needs to not be the BMA's function to launch into a debate on the interpretation of medical proof. That's what the Royal Colleges are for.

Sir Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting. This year's pay increase comes after resident physicians were granted increases worth 22 percent by Mr Streeting last year

The union has violated its bounds, and I'm seriously unhappy about paying my membership to an organisation that makes political statements in my name.

These include calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, for example, and criticism of China for human rights abuses - as if Hamas is going to return Israeli captives or Beijing is going to stop persecuting the Uighur minority, even if a doctor's union in the UK requires it.

This is cheap virtue-signalling, provided for no other reason than to make the BMA officers feel excellent about themselves.

I would admire them a lot more if they put their energy into fact-checking their own claims. The BMA is vulnerable to bandying about numbers that do not stand up to examination.

A few of their figures relating to incomes and inflation have actually been unmasked, utilizing information from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Since BMA members include medical professionals with knowledge in medical statistics, it's a humiliation to everybody.

Most of all, I detest them for wasting the general public support for physicians that we earned at great individual cost during the pandemic.

It is sickening that the real regard in which the medical occupation was held simply 5 years earlier has been changed to a large degree by cynicism and even by displeasure.

Small marvel, then, that lots of junior doctors grumble that their friends with tasks in tech or banking are much better off than they are.

Junior physicians demonstrating outside Downing Street last year throughout strike action

Medicine should be beyond contrast, not merely among a raft of careers determined just by the monetary rewards they bring.