NHS Pay Rise Senario On The News Is Missing The Point.

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Scotland (UK) decided to give their staff a 4% pay rize. England and Wales decided to give their staff 3%. It is all over the news but forget the pay for a moment and concentrate on what they say.
There has been an increasing number of NHS staff going ill with mental related issues. It reached 10% even before the pandemic began, and even before the pandemic began they say that at least a third of NHS staff are wanting to leave the profession due to the stresses of their jobs.

Now think for a minute. A basic nurses salary was three times higher per hour then I was getting in the retail sector with 25 years experience in my specialist field. So they are actually paid pretty well considering the pay in the retail and light engineering sectors (As my role was half way between the two). So a question based on experience here. I do not want to deny them a pay rize as they diserve it. But in itself, a payrize is totally irrelevent to the issues. The issues are the conditions they are facing that need to be addressed and not so much the pay. Make the job easier and lessen the stresses imposed on them by making more staff available to help and they will get satisfaction in what they are doing. It is not about pay they are leaving. It is about the conditions in the job itself.


I will give an example. I once had a very well paid railway job. I had never earned so much per hour in my life and by sheer co-incidence it was actually the exact same pay as a nurses pay!
The first few years the conditions were ok. But then a new company took over and made changes to get more profits. Our jobs became more stressful. The shift patterns became more and more unworkable as the company found it cheaper to increase our hours and rely on us all to do overtime, then if they had employed the number of staff needed to do the jobs. I ended up with my first burnout which may have been a breakdown and so I quit. (I did not know what was happening to me mentally so I told them an excuse that I wanted to run a business and I did want to as it was to try to lessen the stress, but nothing came of the business, and I ended up with a few years of either no income or low income after successive burnouts until eventually I had to quit working all together to preserve my mental and physical health). But it was not the pay at all. Staff said "We are not paid enough to put up with this" but to be totally honest, had their pay doubled or even tripled they would have said the same, because it was the conditions they were working in that was the real issue. The pay was a separate issue altogether! And the same goes for the NHS.
For most staff, if they had no pay rise but instead had easier more favourable conditions where their system worked and went together better so that everything "Gelled" well like a nice smoothrunning machine, they would stay. The pay is actually irrelevent because even if their pay doubled, they would be facing the same stress! (Of course their pay needs to be such that it keeps them happy, but that is not the point. The point is that it is the conditions that need addressing as the cause and not the pay like the news is trying to say, though lets give them a pay rise anyway if we can! ).

And one thing I will say which might help the NHS is to take a look how the retail or the parcels industries works because their systems are some of the most efficient ways of completing the tasks to bring in the money that I have ever seen and I will say that though the NHS is not about making money... If one concentrates on how the retail sector focuses on customer experience and making the most efficient ways to do a service or sell the right products for the customer (Think more of the servicing side as it is more appropiate of a comparisson) and if the NHS was run in the same way, patients would be in and out and seen to with all the operations done in no time because the retail sector is generally not burdened by unions and so its main focus is on the ability to train staff to multitask and specialize in their own areas at the same time... So staff are never idle or shouldn't be and yet because their system is designed to be easy to operate and well thought out and forever changing to adjust to new demands, if it was possible for the NHS to take some positive features as potential solutions by looking at the retail industry they may be in for quite a shock in how well and efficiet it is run. May I suggest a book called "Raving fans?"

While I understand the NHS is a different seanrio, if it can learn some possible solutions to make changes that work well for staff and patients alike, then it surely is a good thing?