The new Government’s willingness to engage in meaningful negotiations with junior doctors (soon to be called resident doctors) has been a refreshing change. Not only have they made some progress towards restoring doctor’s pay back to 2008 (in real terms), but they are even proposing changes to make the life of the junior doctor in the NHS a little bit better.
There remains a lot of work to do if we are to retain our doctors and try and stem the exodus of our highly trained professional staff to countries that seem to value their contributions more. But what about the nurses? While junior doctors have been offered a 22.3 per cent rise over two years, nurses have only been given a 5.5 pay rise over the next year.
Anyone who has spent any time working in the healthcare sector is fully aware of how pivotal nurses are in the actual delivery of care. In the majority of services, it is the nurse who actually delivers the care. For example, a doctor may prescribe an intravenous antibiotic to save someone with sepsis, but it is the nurse who prepares and delivers the antibiotic. This can be said across the majority of services the NHS provides. Nurses are unequivocally the backbone of the health service. Why then is their pay award so much less than junior doctors’?
In part, we must bear in mind that junior doctors have had one the biggest falls in real-term pay since 2008 – according to some sources almost double that of nurses. But that doesn’t fully answer the question.
The simple answer is that the nurses didn’t strike for long enough. Certainly, towards the tail end of the nurses’ strikes, which occurred from November 2022 to February 2023, it was very clear that nurses were feeling the financial impact of the strike. Given that many nurses not only need their full salary to make ends meet but overtime as well, the impact on them and their families was simply too high to keep striking. In effect, the previous Conservative government wore them down. It is of course challenging to negotiate with a government that appeared to have no interest in maintaining the NHS or indeed a high standard of patient care.
So then, there is a lingering question left for this Labour Government. Are pay awards based on value? Are these pay awards intended to prevent the exodus of our NHS staff and fill the 40,000 NHS vacancies? Or, like a dodgy used car salesman, is it simply how much they can get away with?
If pay is based on value, then nurses deserve much more. If it is about staff retention and recruitment, then nurses’ pay will have to be much more. Indeed, if we are to recover healthcare in the UK then frontline NHS staff will need to receive competitive salaries and decent working conditions.
Perhaps then, this is the first real test for the Labour Government. The honeymoon period will soon come to an end and instead of comparing this Government with the woefully inadequate last one, we will begin to judge it on its merits. Is it actually fiscally competent? Do Labour ministers understand that if the NHS fails then so too does the economy? There is no growth without health. If so, then the inevitable conclusion is that nurses deserve to be paid properly; the public deserves their nurses to be paid properly.
The right move for Labour ministers is to go back to the drawing board, ignoring the rhetoric created by their predecessors. They need to ask themselves what we need to get access to healthcare back to where it was in 2008. There will be no surprise answers. The Government will have to commit to restoring pay for all frontline healthcare staff back to 2008 levels. This shouldn’t be much of a commitment if, as Labour claims, growing the economy is an actual target – as opposed to just rhetoric, which the Tories wore out.
