NHS should hire junior doctors and pay them properly - Letter

Resident doctors (junior doctors) are too important to strike, but apparently not important enough to pay properly.

Double digit pay rises might sound generous, but when after years of training, and thousands of pounds in student debt, you are earning little more than the National Living Wage, double digit pay rises don’t add up to very much.

However the annual salary hikes for chief executives, tasked with screwing everyone below them over, will amount to a nice little earner.

Why are so many newly qualified resident doctors, trained in the UK, unable to find work?

It’s scandalous. Hire them and pay them properly.

And what’s all this latest nonsense, ‘corridor care’, where patients are subjected to noise, lack of privacy and harsh lighting 24/7?

It’s undignified and wholly unacceptable. It’s tantamount to bullying inflicted upon those who are at there most vulnerable at a time when they need compassionate care.

Year on year we hear talk about ‘winter pressures’ as though it’s some new kind of unexpectedly phenomenon sprung upon the NHS.

It’s not. After years of Tory cuts undermining our NHS, hospitals no longer have sufficient beds.

So build more capacity, hire more staff, and pay them properly.

Anyone working in our NHS — cleaners, porters etc — shouldn’t be earning a pittance on salaries that need to be subsidised by state benefits and trips to the local foodbank.

Pay them properly, give those who work in our NHS a dignified wage, one that they can afford to comfortably live on.

That’s what we all pay our taxes for.

Not affordable? Well these low paid workers won’t be squirrelling away their pay into offshore bank accounts, they will be buying essentials, food, clothes etc, on which they will be paying tax, VAT etc, feeding money back into the UK economy.

Labour were elected to implement ‘Change’.

They were not elected to continue the chaos in our NHS that was deliberately introduced by the previous government.

So Wes Streeting and Sir ‘Free gear Keir Starmer, stop trying to vilify those on the lowest levels of pay in the NHS, in an attempt to set the public against them.

Get the issue properly sorted, and get it sorted now.