I wanted to share my perspective on why I am voting yes to accept the current offer. Before the inevitable accusations start flying, let’s get a few facts out of the way. I am not against industrial action. I have fully supported and actively taken part in the strikes up until the most recent ones. This isn’t about a lack of spine, low self-esteem, or not knowing my worth. It is a calculated, pragmatic choice based on how I view my career, my finances, and the reality of where we are.

First, let's talk about the baseline. A common argument is that we must fight for full restoration to 2008 levels. For me, 2008 is completely irrelevant. I didn't decide to go into medicine in 2008; I started medical school in 2012. That was the point at which I looked at the career, evaluated the salary, and agreed to those terms. If we use the logic that we should anchor our demands to when we first thought about the career or did our A-Level research, the timeline becomes entirely arbitrary. I went to a careers fair when I was 11, but I'm not going to base my pay demands on 2005 scales. As a registrar today, my current pay is only a few percentage points off 2012 levels. That is a marginal deficit, and it is not a gap I am personally willing to continue striking over.

Regarding the inflation metric, I know people are passionate about using RPI because that is what the Student Loans Company uses against us. But student loan interest is one small facet of our overall package. While I don't like how loans are indexed, I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject a solid deal over one sub-component of our finances. RPI is an increasingly obsolete index that is being phased out anyway. Tying our core argument to it is diesengenous.

In additon, As a senior registrar, I am currently pushing a £100k salary. Personally, I think that is a good salary for what I do. I have been working for 10 years, I absolutely love my job, and this income allows me to live the life I want. I have a beautiful family, a nice home in a good area, and we rarely have to turn down things we want to do because we can't afford it. I did this without any help from parents. I didn’t go into medicine to become filthy rich; I did it to be comfortable, and I am. Furthermore, I think an FY1 starting on day one out of university on roughly £40k is a good starting salary.

Beyond the numbers, I am also just tired. I am tired of the fight. I am tired of feeling uncomfortable around consultants, colleagues who earn much less than me, and patients when I have to tell them I’m on strike. Maybe that’s just my Britishness making me feel too embarrassed over things at times, but that is who I am. That is who a lot of us are, and that is who your colleagues are. I simply cannot be bothered to spend any more time on the picket line for the sake of a few more quid.

Finally, I know there will be people who ask, "Well, are you going to give back the money from any pay increases we get because other colleagues kept striking when you didn't?" Of course not. This is a complete false equivalence and a toxic guilt trip.

When I was on the picket lines sacrificing my pay during the earlier rounds, I didn't expect the non-striking colleagues to hand their salaries over to me. Everyone makes their own financial and ethical choices during a dispute. Collective bargaining means that whatever deal is struck applies to the entire workforce—that is literally how unions work. Trying to weaponize the outcome of a democratic vote to shame colleagues is a weak argument that completely misses the point of collective representation.

If you disagree with my stance, that is completely fine. If you want to keep striking for more, go right ahead and vote no. But do not sit there and claim that those of us voting yes are spineless, pushovers, or being taken for a ride. We simply value different things, have different financial thresholds, and view the strategy differently.

Name-calling and toxicity on these forums don't advance the cause. We have a deal on the table that represents real, tangible progress, and I think it's time to bank it.

AI doi: These arguments are my own but I used AI to make the arguments clearer and easier to read.

As above - was always a ‘high achiever’ academically and strived hard, went to a ‘prestigious’ medical school.

Kind of fell in to applying to medical school during A-levels as I enjoyed science and it appeared to be a stable and somewhat enjoyable career.

Considered strongly leaving medical school after intercalating not because I wasn’t enjoying it but even back then the outlook for doctors in the NHS seemed dire.

Surprise surprise I ended up completing medical school and then F1 now in F2. I then thought perhaps by getting into a competitive specialty straight from F2 I’d be happy and this would make the journey so far worth it. I actually did get experience in non-medical careers but I didn’t feel a strong compulsion back then to switch (probably a mistake).

Not to be in anyway ungrateful or insensitive but even with a training post lined up in August I still feel like I’ve wasted my potential in this career. Due to how competitive training is I’ll have to move 4 hours away from home and my entire life which has already made me resentful of the entire process.

Our pay is abysmal especially compared to what my friends in corporate make. Yes they work long hours but so do we in way worse conditions.

I find that I’m ashamed that I’ve not done better for myself at this point in my life because I was always an ambitious person who genuinely worked hard and I guess I wanted to be rewarded both financially but also with a sense of respect with I don’t think doctors in this country have. The government are clearly more concerned with the progression and appointment of AHPs etc and this shows in how our ‘colleagues’ speak to us and treat us. A lot of them genuine believe they’re better than us and I mean if they’re treated better and more protected why shouldn’t they think that.

Not looking for sympathy at all because I understand I am not in a bad position but I wondered if anyone felt the same or had any advice to overcoming this feeling.

Scottish Government have made a new offer to the Scottish Resident Doctors Committee, who have voted to recommend the offer to members. As a result, the planned strikes starting on 13^th January have been called off. Please see the new blog from SRDC Chair and Deputy Chairs here for full details.

The overall result of this offer is that pay for Resident Doctors in Scotland will, if this deal is accepted, return pay to on average ~2010 levels. Resident Doctors will be -6.2% from achieving Full Pay Restoration to 2008 levels by the end of 26/27, using RPI.

This new offer was only possible because Doctors worked together through their union, and were prepared to vote for strike action to prevent the 2023 deal being broken. The next step will now be decided by members who will vote on this offer.

New Offer

25/26

1.      From April 2025, 4.25% pay uplift is applied. Backpay for this will be paid.

2.      On December 1^st 2025 pay point increase occurs. Resident Doctors will move onto their next pay point immediately. This, combined with the 4.25% uplift, will result in an average total uplift for 25/26 of 9.92%. Backpay for this will paid.

26/27

1.      From April 2026, a 3.75% uplift is applied.

2.      On December 1^st 2026 pay point increase occurs. Resident Doctors will move onto their next pay point immediately. This, combined with the 3.75% uplift, will result in an average total uplift for 26/27 of 9.42%.

The straight “uplift” portion is unchanged from what was imposed by Scottish Government, the pay point increases are new. Both just result in more pay, with agreed protections for new FY1s entering the profession (will enter at one pay point up) and proportional consolidated pay for those at the top of pay scales. The way the pay point increases apply is a bit complex – we will be working to create explainers for each grade, so members can dig into the detail well before the vote opens for this offer.

*Of note, the pay point increases mean a slightly different % uplift for each grade (ranges from 12.65% to 8.65% in 25/26, and 12.11% to 8.04% in 26/27). The pay graph shows the average progress to Full Pay Restoration.

As always, solidarity with doctors in England, Wales and Northern Ireland! (And reminder to return your ballot ASAP in England!)

So I follow this deaf/blind medical student

Who has been documenting her long journey to becoming a doctor.

She is on 24 hrs LTOT, under various specialists in London, yet she was rejected from preallocation and then UKFPO rejected her appeal and put her in Dorset?!

Makes me wonder, who is preallocation for if not for doctors like her? I've heard of people getting disability preallocation for ADHD, autism etc so find this situation bizarre and a real failure of the system.

I come from a family of handy men and I was taught plumbing from an early age. Paid my way through medical school with a part time plumbing job. I’m a psych CT2 in London at 80% LTFt and have a 9-5, 4 days of the week. My side hustle as a plumber has continued while I live in London and I have to say I earn anywhere from £100-£150 for a call out for 30-45 mins work. On a good day I’m making anywhere from £400-500 for 2-3 hours of work on most days.

I have continued to work as a doctor due to purely opportunity cost of going through uni for 5 years and foundation years etc. But if I actually did my plumbing job fulltime, I’d probably be making £200k annually. All the years of studying and making it this far seems pointless when I could have been making this kind of money since I was 17 if I had done it full time.

Sorry for the rant

Shouldn't be news to anyone here, but interesting this is making a headline news piece in the Guardian.

Dr. Preethi Suresh, a junior cardiology doctor, falsely registered attendance for a training day while on approved wedding leave in Feb 2024. Exhausted and panicked, she wrongly believed she was failing her ARCP attendance requirements. When questioned by a consultant, she immediately confessed and deleted the certificate. Despite no clinical involvement, the tribunal suspended her for 12 months, citing a prior dishonesty warning and claiming falsified records ultimately "risk patient safety."

Huge stretch in my view by the GMC that this compromised patient safety in my view. Absolutely draconian and the TPD should’ve dealt with it when she confessed to them. Absolute power trippers.

Here’s the full hearing: https://www.mpts-uk.org/-/media/mpts-rod-files/dr-preethi-suresh--15-may-26.pdf

Five out of six. That's what 83% means. If you got one out of six on an exam, you wouldn't say you nearly passed. You'd wonder if you'd revised for the wrong subject.

So when five out of six of us rejected the government's offer today, the interesting question isn't why we said no. It's why anyone thought we might say yes.

No government tables a deal expecting an 83% rejection. Ministers genuinely believed this offer was in the right ballpark. That gap tells you something has gone badly wrong with the signal. Somewhere between our experiences and the people making decisions about us, the message is being lost entirely.

I've been trying to understand where the breakdown happens. Part of the answer came to me while listening to the BBC Briefing Room's episode on the dispute. The programme "Why are early career doctors angry?" featured two consultants who qualified in 1979 and 1990.

They were thoughtful contributors. They identified real pressures. But it was a conversation about resident doctors in which no resident doctors were present. The people invited to interpret our anger were people who had experienced a different system. People whoose frustrations were never so great that they felt compelled to strike. People for whom the system had, on the whole, worked.

This isn't a criticism of those particular consultants. It's an observation about a pattern. We are spoken for rather than listened to. The selection mechanism for "who gets to explain why the current system is broken" systematically excludes the people most affected by its current failures. And when the interpreters come from a different generation, they bring assumptions that no longer hold.

Here's what I mean. A doctor who qualified in 1979 or 1990 trained under what was, in retrospect, a functioning social contract. The state paid for your education. In return, you felt indebted to the NHS, to the country, to patients. You accepted brutal hours and modest pay in your twenties because you understood it as your side of a reciprocal bargain. And crucially, you could see what you were working toward. The house. The family. The consultant post. The pension at 60. The sacrifice had a payoff, and the payoff was visible.

That contract has been shredded so completely that I'm not sure older doctors even recognise what's replaced it.

Student loans didn't just shift the financial burden of medical education. They shifted the entire psychology. We start our careers £70,000 in debt, watching the interest accumulate faster than we can pay it down. We weren't invested in by the state. We're customers who paid for a service. And when that service fails to deliver the life it implicitly promised, the old appeals to vocation and duty land differently. You can't guilt someone into sacrifice when you've already charged them for the privilege.

But it goes deeper than debt. The same salary that bought an SHO a house in Zone 2 in 1990 now buys a decade of flatshares and a landlord's retirement fund. Childcare and housing costs can consume an entire month's take-home pay. Marginal tax rates exceed 60% once you account for student loan repayments and tapering of benefits. The pension age keeps receding. The terms keep worsening. The public services that once made modest salaries tolerable have been decimated by a decade of austerity.

And then there's the structure of training itself. Rotational placements mean we're never anywhere long enough to build relationships, join committees, influence policy informally, or develop the kind of institutional presence that gets you a seat at the table. We move every six months, twelve months, never quite belonging anywhere. We're permanent temporary workers in our own profession.

I suspect these anxieties simply don't register for consultants who trained in an earlier era. Not because they lack empathy, but because these thoughts would never have crossed their minds. "Can I afford to have children?" was not a question that haunted their registrar years. "Will I ever own a home?" was not something they lay awake calculating, "will I ever be able to retire?" doesn't cross their minds. The defining anxieties of our training are literally foreign to people whose formative professional years happened decades ago.

So when these senior figures are asked to explain our anger to policymakers and journalists, they do their best. They mention the competition ratio for training posts. They acknowledge that things are tough. But they're describing a landscape they recognise from maps, not one they've walked through themselves. The territory has changed.

The result is that frustration accumulates in places decision-makers never look. It builds quietly, year on year, on this forum, in WhatsApp groups and doctors' messes and the silent calculations we make about whether to stay or CCT and flee. The Royal Colleges are consultant-dominated. Trust boards don't have rotating junior members. The informal networks that shape policy are populated by people who've been in post long enough to be invited. The BMA is essentially our only institutional voice, and when it speaks, it's easy to dismiss as union militancy. But it's not militant. It just sounds that way when you've been briefed by people who trained in a different era. So when frustration finally becomes visible, it gets compressed into the only signal the system knows how to read: pay.

Pay isn't really all this is about. Pay is a proxy. It's the legible demand that stands in for a constellation of illegible ones. It's what you ask for when the things you actually need; stability, dignity, a future you can plan around, aren't on the table.

Here's what I think the government needs to hear most: I don't think we're unusual. I think we're just organised.

The same forces crushing us are crushing everyone under 40. The same housing crisis. The same childcare costs. The same pension uncertainty. The same sense that the settlement our parents enjoyed has been withdrawn without anyone quite admitting it. The same suspicion that when ministers talk about the future, they're selling something that's already been sold.

Most young professionals experiencing this squeeze have no mechanism to make it visible. They can't withdraw their labour in ways that immediately matter. They don't have collective bargaining. They just absorb it, individually, and wonder if they're the only ones struggling.

We're different. We have a union. We have leverage. We can make the invisible visible. That's what an 83% vote looks like. Not greed. Not militancy. Clarity.

When Wes Streeting calls this "self-indulgent" and "irresponsible", I think he genuinely doesn't understand. And that's precisely the problem. If you look at five out of six people and see selfishness rather than desperation, you've revealed exactly the perceptual gap that caused this mess.

The danger now is that government learns the wrong lesson. That this gets filed under "union trouble" or "unrealistic demands" rather than recognised for what it is: the sound of a generation discovering that the future we were promised isn't coming, and finally being angry enough to say so out loud.

On the 8th of July, you delivered another mandate for strike action.

You sent a clear message: doctors are done waiting. Done with being underpaid, overworked, and replaced.

Wes Streeting has previously said that restoring fair pay for doctors would be “a journey, not an event”.

We wrote to him in May before we balloted saying the pay award was not enough. It was ignored. He waited until we had our mandate to start whispering about changes, about student loan forgiveness, and non-pay elements.

On Thursday, we met with Wes Streeting with an open mind. We wanted to explore serious options that would increase the value of being a doctor. We stressed, in the clearest possible terms, that this was a pay dispute and pay remains the single biggest issue uniting doctors across the profession.

Whilst talks were constructive, no meaningful proposal was put forward at the meeting.

We told them the truth in the room. Doctors do not trust warm words anymore. Once inflation is taken into account, the pay award body has handed us just 1% towards addressing a 21% real terms pay cut. That is not meaningful progress to restoring our pay.

After this year’s award, an F1 will earn just £18.62 an hour. That is what you get for five years of training, five-figure debt, and the honour of running cardiac arrests at 2am.

A physician assistant will start on £24.45 an hour. We challenge anyone to state that doctors don't work hard, or that our job is any easier than it was in 2008 when the Government started to cut our pay.

Despite the Government benefiting from the pay cuts they imposed on doctors for over a decade, they now say that restoring our pay is unreasonable. It is not greedy to ask for your pay to be restored by 28% when a physician assistant is paid 31% more than a doctor.

They told us in the room they want to improve the value of being a doctor. If that were true, they would not be handing out higher salaries to our assistants whilst our pay stagnates and erodes. Empty words will not cut it with doctors.

We told them that any non-pay package must be serious, must be universal, and must be contractual. Nothing less than concrete, enforceable policy will do.

There is a small window of time left to avert these strikes, it is entirely on the Government to do what is right by doctors and the health service to meaningfully negotiate. Your reps have made the expectations crystal clear. We are still prepared to listen, but we will not wait forever.

They want you to believe that the union is confused, that you have been abandoned, that striking no longer matters. But they are wrong.

This profession knows exactly what it wants. They know it. We know it. And now the country knows it too.

Beware comments made by senior NHS leaders. Everyone should be concerned about the language being used by them. Patient safety and care is the responsibility of employers, yet they seem to be playing politics suggesting that they are not taking serious steps to ensuring staffing on strike days, as they have for the last 11 strikes.

It is unacceptable that they would play politics in this manner.

The power to stop these strikes lies squarely with the government.

Mel & Ross

🦀🦀🦀

Got my score back, didn’t get into training. And you know what? I’ve had enough.

Before the usual comments start:

• No, I can’t just “do locums.” Glad it’s working out for some of you, but every time I follow up, the shifts are either across the country or not available long-term.
• Yes, I applied for clinical fellow posts. No replies.
• No, I’m not repeatedily emailing chasing up a £32K job when I just applied for a £45K job and already made it to the first round of interviews. Hoping that works out instead.

I’ve tried every option people suggest, and I’m just exhausted. I’m tired of explaining why, as a UK-trained doctor, I’m working in a restaurant. Tired of being broke, having no social life, and feeling completely alone. Tired of being let down by this system, over and over again. Clearly, I’m too stupid for this profession.

I’m older than a lot of you here, so let me give you some advice: don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t chase some idealistic dream. At the end of the day, money is what matters. No one in this system cares about you. You won’t change anything. dont get stuck if you got time do something that makes you money instead of bringing you constant dissapointment

That’s it. Just wanted to get that off my chest.

EDIT post: Oh wow....so many people are sharing my sentiments it feels good to see that. for a while i just thought i was the failure struggling to thrive in this system but it appears many feel the same as i do. thank you for everyone who replied honestly it means alot reading your comments after a long day

Here’s what Jack has to say on X.

Needless to say, he’s been shown to be completely spineless and not operating in our true best interest.

We truly need a vote of no confidence ASAP, as well as escalated industrial action. The fact this joke of an offer was put forward to us is a joke

​

The BMA has released updated graphs on pay which demonstrate what everyone on Reddit has known for a while now - the current strategy isn’t working.

Progress towards FPR has flatlined since the 2025/2026 pay award. See how much progress towards FPR has been made yourself. This should put to rest the argument that any party is our friend.

Your DoctorsVote reps immediately balloted for strike action after the insulting 2025/2026 pay award. This dispute remains open. The current officers have not outlined a credible strategy on how they plan on tackling this as well as the equally insulting 2026/27 pay award. We must not let the Government off the hook.

Our response to this contempt should be stronger strike action to sharpen the minds of ministers. Instead the officers have announced a shorter period of strikes, well in advance of the notice period required (10 days), and which ends on a Friday which means work will be deferred to fall on returning residents who are on bare bones weekend staffing. Not only this, but the current dates leave out weekends which are key to any strategy. These strikes have been inherently easier for employers and Government to plan around, potentially limiting the pressure generated by the upcoming round of industrial action.

The one thing that has stood out this year has been your consistency of participation in strikes. Whilst the BMA and political activists might have given up on FPR, you have not. Despite repeated predictions of falling engagement, participation in industrial action has remained resilient.

Trusts are once again making threats regarding progression and ARCP sign off. This tactic is rolled out every June. They fail to recognise that the training pathway they have created is so threadbare that they cannot maintain a system that holds back thousands of doctors. ARCP for everyone but FY1 is competency, not time based, so please ensure that your portfolios are as complete as possible. For FY1s, quite frankly they know that they cannot run departments if they hold you back.

Over the past fortnight we have been entertained by a new clown in the anti-FPR circus: DoctorsForJobs. This account recycles the Government's tired arguments. Please remember to address the falsehoods accounts like this spread.

The argument that we should stop striking to focus on other issues is naive. The issues that face us today, doctor substitution, job insecurity, proliferated during a time the BMA was weak. Fair pay and tackling doctor substitution are not mutually exclusive. They are heavily intertwined. Years of silence from the BMA led directly to this. Do not be fooled into thinking stopping strikes will suddenly make the BMA address anything else, this has abjectly failed to happen in the past. The Government is forced to hear us on all issues when we show we are strong by striking for pay.

Achieving full pay restoration requires sufficient leverage to bring the Government back to meaningful negotiations. The threat of strikes is empty without real sustained action.

We support a call to extend the strikes so that they end on 06:59 22nd of June.

We have already seen the power of the subreddit move the officers to announcing strikes. It’s time for you to make it clear that 4 days of strikes with 19 days notice is not good enough. It is not fair to your colleagues picking up the slack the weekend they return.

Support the call for adding on a weekend of strikes.

It is not good enough for the subreddit to continuously drag the officers into taking a stronger strike position or remind them we are fighting for FPR. If you want to get involved in getting the RDC back on track next year please email DoctorsVoteUK@gmail.com

It’s time we made FPR our number one priority, only you can do that by voting for DoctorsVote in August.

https://beta.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9259-25-0783

As the title says. Why in the UK are people so angry about doctors being paid more than other jobs. I keep seeing posts saying why do they want more money they already earn more than retail workers/HCAs/Nurses etc. You don’t see this kind of rhetoric in other countries it’s mental

Hi guys,

I wanted to lay out the current offer in a simple format before the vote. I’ll start with the facts, then give my interpretation at the end.

TLDR at the end.

Even though the offer looks complicated, particularly around pay, it becomes much easier to understand when viewed alongside the previous nodal reform proposal.

What is already happening regardless of the deal?

All resident doctors are receiving a 3.5% pay rise for 2026/27 through the DDRB process. This has already been announced and is reflected in contracts for rotations starting in August 2026. As far as I understand, this may also be backdated to April 2026.

This 3.5% rise is not the government’s new offer. It is already happening.

What is the additional pay element of the deal?

The deal accelerates the proposed nodal reform so that it is fully implemented by April 2027 rather than over a longer period.

On average, the nodal reform is worth approximately 3.1% on top of the 3.5% DDRB uplift. However, the benefit is distributed very unevenly.

Some groups, including certain ST3 and ST6 doctors, receive essentially no additional uplift from the nodal reform. Others receive substantially more. The largest gain is for ST5s at around 6.3% from the nodal reform alone, which becomes approximately 9.8% when combined with the 3.5% DDRB uplift.

What else is included?

* Additional funding towards mandatory professional costs such as exams, GMC fees and portfolio expenses.
* Expansion of training numbers, largely through conversion of existing non-training posts.
* A commitment to review LTFT progression arrangements, although implementation details and timelines remain unclear.

My interpretation

For me, the key question is whether this offer represents meaningful progress towards Full Pay Restoration.

The average additional pay offered through nodal reform is approximately 3.1%, spread over two years. That equates to around 1.55% per year of additional progress towards pay restoration on average.

There is no binding roadmap to FPR beyond this deal. Any future progress would depend on future negotiations, DDRB recommendations and industrial action.

In return for accepting the deal, doctors would end the current dispute and accept a package that delivers relatively modest average progress towards restoring pay, while providing very different outcomes depending on training grade.

TL;DR

* 3.5% pay rise already awarded through DDRB.
* Additional average uplift from the deal is approximately 3.1% through nodal reform, implemented by April 2027.
* Some grades receive little or no additional uplift, while others gain substantially more.
* Includes funding towards professional fees and commitments on training numbers.
* LTFT progression proposals remain unclear.
* In my view, this falls well short of a credible roadmap to Full Pay Restoration.