A key point that the wonderful world of media seems oblivious too today is that "doctors'" pensions are no different than any other NHS worker: so that includes porters, nurses, lab workers, radiographers, secretaries, managers and chief executives (some of whom may have chosen not to opt for the NHS pension).
There is no such entity as "the doctors' pension"
Doctors have chosen and voted to take action today, but their actions, if successful, would safeguard pension arrangements for many NHS workers. I'm not going to be all one-sided about this - it will include higher-paid NHS workers earning the same as doctors. Nevertheless, doctors do make up a high proportion of well-paid NHS staff so stand to lose more than other groups that can't earn as much. For those naive patients thinking doctors are the best paid, think again - there are plenty of advanced and senior nurses earning as much and more as many junior doctors; some nurse consultant pay rivals that of medical consultants.
It's obviously a lot easier to vilify the minority of doctors who earn hundreds of thousands of pounds (just like all MPs were tarnished by the expenses scandal which was perpetrated by a minority of greedy MPs) than it is to actually bother to gather some facts, or at least some doctors who are representative of the whole debate. In our TOWIE/Kim Kardashian/"Look at me!" world, it's often whoever shouts loudest who gets their point across, rather than a sensible insult-free individual.
Take a listen here:
Dr Wendy Noble makes an admirable attempt to explain
the BMA and doctor's opinion, but is it really in any doubt what the
interviewer's position is?
I'm perhaps not surprised; a few weeks ago, the Daily
Telegraph and Daily Mail emailed adverts looking for "doctors who
oppose the strike" which ended up on Doctors.net.uk.
Media reporting
Something that really frustrates me about news and media is they way that few journalists are able to approach a situation from a neutral point of view. To try and balance this, they will often try to have two points of view, which supposedly makes a story "balanced" - the trouble with the BMA day of action is that it's easy to drag a member of the Patient's Association and present them as some learned source of information as to why "doctors pensions" are wrong.
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients' Association, said: 'The only people who will lose out in this are patients.'Every extra day that someone waits in pain for an operation or treatment is a day too long.'
This kind of reporting makes my blood boil. This comment is idiotic on two fronts: firstly, no-one can disagree with the sentence (i.e. NO-ONE wants anyone else to suffer, do they?), but that doesn't make it particularly more relevant to today's action than on any other day. Secondly, the BMA and participating doctors have done their utmost to make today as disruption free as possible. Has any media outlet read the BMA press release?!
The debate around this one comment is massive, but for me boils down to: if you want a free healthcare service within a limited budget, sometimes instant and all-encompassing care matched to whatever a self-defined patient will be impossible. The whole UK population needs to be considered, and that means everyone can't have what they want. If the PA or anyone else wants a system where there is true 24/7 healthcare, then someone somewhere is going to have to pay more for it.
I've just seen the BBC 6 o'clock news headlines, and predictably they've found a patient whose routine operation has been postponed (I doubt very much it was cancelled as stated). But good old North West Tonight, actually using a neutral phrase; "What impact has the action had?"
A tangled issue
You'll notice from my blogs that it is so easy to veer off and start discussing the meta-issue that is the very nature of the NHS itself. I haven't done a poll but base this comment on discussions with my own colleagues, but for many taking part in action today, the treating of the NHS as a big-old political game of Theme Hospital has engendered many negative feelings. The pensions dispute is simply the match to the well prepared fire-bed.So are doctors' pensions too generous?
There's a nice graph at the bottom of this BBC news story:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18523896
It shows how doctors earn more in their pension than anyone else they are compared to. I don't know what figures have been used to create this graph, and so it's hard to comment on it. I imagine that with the right amount of selection, I could also create a graph that shows doctors earn more than the Queen, Apple and the Chinese Space Agency.
It's quite a hard question that I'm still wrestling with. Just how do you compare doctors to nurses to judges to MPs to teachers to Tube drivers to the unemployed?
It's complicated because public sector workers typically earn less than their private sector counterparts, in return for better job security and benefits such as pensions. The frequent comparison with private sector pensions is unhelpful - private doctors who have to have private pensions earn more in their day job so can afford more pension contributions.
For me, it boils down to fairness. Why don't we make all public sector pensions equitable - i.e. all public sector workers pay a fixed proportion of their wage into a scheme, with no differentiation between NHS staff, government staff or teachers? If it's fair for NHS staff, then it should be fair for civil servants too. The fact that it isn't says a lot to me about Andrew Lansley's views of NHS staff (and that's for another blog).
What do you think?
Tell your MP, and why not ask them what pension they will get, at what age and how much they need to pay into it. And then ask your GP the same. That way, you make up your own mind and not rely on the Daily Mail to tell you.
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