Sir, The average earnings for a full-time employee in the UK are £28,258, according to ASHE, the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. The minimum salary for a first-year consultant is soon to be £70,822 (report, Mar 31).

This salary rises rapidly, through a combination of yearly incremental increases; and substantial bonuses provided by the award of “discretionary points”. This system, whereby salary increases are awarded largely by colleagues (who usually have points themselves), is not open to porters and cleaners or other health professionals. After five years or so, a consultant may well earn more than £90,000, without counting the “benefits” of private practice (which can still be carried out in the normal working week).

Modern consultants, like their predecessors, have an inflated view of their own importance. They think they have an almost God-like right to be paid well, very well. This is because they think they have more worth to society than dustmen, cleaners and people who run corner shops. Doctors are not the only group in society that work long hours, in stressful jobs. The only right they have is respect, but respect has to be earned.

If modern doctors are rarely respected, then that is their fault.

In 1948 the chief problem facing the Health Minister Aneurin Bevan was the reluctance of consultants to work in NHS hospitals and give up their highly paid private practices. The problem was solved by allowing them to work a limited number of hours for the NHS and keep their private patients.

Bevan discovered then what Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are discovering now: the motivation that keeps many doctors going is not altruism or respect, but greed.

DR ANDREW STEIN
Consultant Physician
Coventry

Sir, According to Patricia Hewitt, the Government’s phased payrise for NHS consultants will cost them £80 a month until November, a matter of seven months.

Excuse me for not sympathising a great deal. NHS radiographers, who each earn less than a third of a consultant’s salary, will find themselves giving the Government considerably more than £80 per month for the rest of their working lives through having to work an extra two and a half hours a week (or two weeks a year) under the new pay and conditions package called Agenda for Change.

This system was overwhelmingly rejected by our profession, but forced on us anyway.

SHIRLEY MOORMAN
Kinoulton, Notts

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