Friday 14 January 2011

How much!? again

After the recent claim in the media that NHS consultants earn an average of £130,000 pa along comes another bit of inaccurate and misleading consultant bashing. It is now claimed that “some” consultants “can” earn £100,000 on top of their basic salaries, in overtime. 

In fact this is the same trick as the “GPs earn £300,000” con. Find out the single GP with the highest income in the UK and then imply that we are all getting that much. Below the headline the details show that only a handful are earning anything like this much, and there is also the admission that average basic pay for consultants is of the order of £90,000, which is far more believable.

The figure of £100,000 extra appears to relate to just one individual and by my calculations that means he is doing an extra 4 sessions a week. If this guy is already on a full time contract he must be dead on his feet, and I would say he deserves every penny. He runs a serious risk of becoming the richest man in the graveyard. 

You wonder how he finds time to spend any of his money, and in the knackered state he must be in what he would spend it on. It reminds me of a quote attributed to George Best when he was asked where all the money he had earned went. “I spent most of it on booze, fags & women. The rest I wasted.”

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