In my wife's team, she's the youngest (at 40), with several due for retirement in the next 18 months. They've stopped taking any trainees to replace them, so goodness only knows how they will staff the unit in a few years. As it is, morale is incredibly low because the managers are flogging them like pack horses. To be honest, the wages are not really here nor there, but the way teams are managed and the workload of those teams mean burnout is incredibly high. That's what hurts the most.
I suspect that in an age of staff haemoraging, creeping inflation, and the ideologically-driven stagnation of investment, resulting in indefinite seasonal crises, the NHS finds it rather difficult to devise and affect long-term strategic planning. As anyone who has ever watched a team get relegated from the Premier League will be aware, prudent future planning proves somewhat elusive when you're faced with existential weekly challenges. Those who are serious about reforming the NHS recognise that the first step is restoring a measure of stability, and sanity. It is hard to plan ahead or carry out sweeping technological reforms when you can barely keep people from dying in the hallways or the ambulence queues every winter...
Since we're going with anecdotal evidence, Canadian hospitals (according to family members who work in them) have all the UK staff they can handle applying for Canadian positions these days. And even if, however bad for moral, pathetic wages aren't enough to drive most settled NHS workers with family ties overseas, they are most certainly a deterrent to attracting the new English-speaking recruits from overseas that the service will desperately need - and that's if Home Office doesn't try to detain them indefinitely in Yarl's Wood or render then to the CIA just for presuming to enter in the first place. Why we imagine anyone would attempt to live in London working irregular hours to exhaustion for £22k/year when they could get at least 50% more elsewhere is beyond me. But then, as Brexit shows us, we are still light years away from grasping our true standing in the world - or how much we've done to reduce it since 2010.
In any event, more money is not in and of itself sufficient to fix the NHS's many problems, but it is indisputably necessary. Adopting the Canadian taxation rate on the highest bracket of earners could be a good first step, and hardly akin to Venezuela - notwithstanding much of the media's inevitable Chicken Little act should anyone left of Blair actually attempt something constructive...
