No more £3,500-a-shift doctors, Jeremy Hunt tells NHS | Society | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015 ... -tells-nhs

Oh, do fcuk off. Did this come as a shock to him? He's coming out with this to grab a headline that hides chronic understaffing.

Um.They don't have enough doctors & nurses on permanent contracts to meet their staffing requirements so they have to get in agency staff to cover, who they pay much more per hour for than they would pay contracted employees. Am I the only one seeing a solution to this problem?

Aside from the patently obvious issue that if they cap the amount the trusts can spend on agency staff and the trusts need the agency staff to meet care requirements, who exactly is going to suffer when they can't get staff in because they're not able to pay the agency any more money? It's not the bloody minister for health, is it?

But no, they obviously have no intention whatsoever to run the NHS into the ground and ruin it's reputation to make the advent of widespread privatised health care in the UK more palatable to the population. That's not what's happening at all.

Jesus wept.

Lots of points to raise here

1. The £3500 shift was iirc over a weekend something like 80 hours. Which works out to £43/hr. Hardly "expensive" considering solicitors would charge more than £100/hr for the same time.
2. There has always been chronic understaffing in the NHS. If there are staff shortages, what are you gonna do? Pull them off a tree? No. You're gonna hire agency staff.
3. Market forces at work. The higher the demand, the more you can ask for pay. Does it not say something that the Tories want a free market and then want to rig it?
4. Out of hours service (previously run by GPs) was taken over by private companies who found they couldn't make a profit if they tried to pay market rates for doctors. Which meant that a lot of out of hours services were understaffed and offen run by nurses with GP supervision.
5. All this highlights is chronic underfunding, poor T&Cs, and chronic understaffing have led to this problem. Give good enough pay and T&Cs, and have enough staff that they won't feel demoralised and unappreciated. Hunt didnt change things. He made them worse.

I should add that I've worked out my hourly rate for my day job is something like £35/hr (slightly less than that). Of this, I pay tax, indemnity, pension, professional costs etc and it amounts to something like £10/hr in my pocket. If that doctor was working through an agency, the agency would have had its cut too.

If I try to work more than my 40 hrs/week, or try and do out of hours sessions, indemnity rises massively because the risk becomes higher. There have been anecdotal reports of GPs being charged upto £30k/yr for just indemnity which puts off a lot of GPs from doing more work especially in out of hours.

Edit: my fiancee works as a radiographer. She sometimes does extra sessions in house but she could get more by quitting and working for an agency. She'd get more money but loses pension, annual and study leave, and job security. The payoff for doing agency is more money and control over working hours.

How do you do 80 hours over a weekend?

IIRC it was a 3-day weekend. Will try and find a reference.