My wife is a band 6 nurse, has a degree and a masters, the latter was totally self funded while working full time. She now runs her own clinic where she treats patients with little to no supervision from a doctor. A doctor will be “available” which is how they get away with asking her to do 80-90% of what a doctor would, while paying her a nurses salary.
For all this she gets paid £38k a year which includes the London weighting. Without the London payment, she’d be on the same wage as a junior doctor just going through training. That’s despite having ten years experience as a nurse and five years of specialised work in her particular field.
The saddest thing is that she is actually lucky, in comparison to most nurses who are stuck on wards working nights and dealing with pissheads or watching people die every day.
It’s a joke, and sadly a lot of NHS staff who have degrees feel trapped because their training and qualifications are not particularly easy to transfer to roles outside of the health service for similar pay.
The pension is often touted as a positive, but in reality it’s a pair of golden handcuffs. If you retire five years before the state pension age you lose 25% of your annual pension for life. You now see nurses holding on working shifts into their mid sixties because they cannot afford to take the hit. That aspect of the pension never gets brought up in the media though funnily enough.
