Mendacity, stupidity or illiteracy? Which is it, mental nurse?

Oh my. A guest post by Dr Crippen. Well, never let it be said that we at Mental Nurse shy away from free speech, so I’ve approved it.

Well, Dr Crippen, I’ve re-read through the post in question and don’t really feel that I’ve misquoted you. The point you appeared to be making is that newly-qualified nurses don’t usually have a car, family or mortgage to pay for, and as various commenters (including myself) pointed out on that post, that’s an assertion that simply isn’t true.

But anyway Dr Crippen, moving on to the main issue in my original post, do you really, honestly believe that doctor starting salaries should be on a par with the top-paying law firms? Not an average law firm, but the absolute top-whack City of London firms that you’d have to be among the best of the law graduates to even be considered for?

I mean, really?

I read the post, only because Dr C posted on Mental Nurse, not because I read his blog anymore. It’s no good for my complain-o-meter.

Dr C was not misquoted. He is clearly backpeddling in this post, and we’re not falling for it, even if we don’t all have a medical degree as we are just the plebs.

Dr C clearly thinks having a medical degree makes you the bestestest most cleveror range of people in the whole entire UNIVERSE.

I would like to applaud Z on his tagging of this post. Most appropriate.

Dr C clearly thinks having a medical degree makes you the bestestest most cleveror range of people in the whole entire UNIVERSE.

But they are, aren’t they? As Dr C said, medical students are “la creme de la creme”. Anyone who does a degree in anything other than medicine is clearly a sub-literate peasant.

But I think we all need to feel sorry for the poor underpaid doctors. After all, their mate Tarquin managed to bag himself a ludicrously overpaid job at a Blue Chip city law firm, and AMAZINGLY Tarquin’s salary is higher than the starting salary of an NHS junior doctor! Cor blimey, would you believe it?

I think we should all give our money to the doctors.

Money does not prove your worth. When will Dr C start complaining that consultants get paid less than premiership footballers? That seems to be where he’s heading… More and more ludicrous.

Crippen posting on Mental Nurse ?. Fair play, he deserves his say.

I`m looking at it from this perspective. It`s been obvious to me, for some time, that the credit crunch and the energy crisis were on their way. I`m convinced that we`re in for a major recession and that the public sector has little to look forward to other than widescale redundancies and even pay cuts. Doctors were the last people to benefit from NuLabour`s reckless spending when they paniced the government, in the run up to an election, into awarding them an inordinately generous pay rise for doing less work. They weren`t grateful at the time and they`re not grateful now. They certainly didn`t consider the lot of any other public sector worker before gleefully accepting.

So, Crippen, even if you are supportive - and I`m firmly of the opinion that you don`t give a toss - we don`t want your sympathy.

Crippen posting on mental nurse, what is the world coming to. Next he will be praising consultant nurses

Is this for real, a guest post from Dr. C? I can feel the earth beginning to spin off it’s axis.

“As regards nurses, this scenario is of course too silly for words. A house, car and family? What nurse at the start of her/his career “expects” to have a house, a car and a family to support? Nurses at this stage have none of that and frequently are helped out financially by parents or better-paid partners.

Crazy.”

Dr Crippen

Dr Crippen a while back, explaining why just under 20 grand is a perfectly adequate salary for a recently-qualified nurse.

Zarathustra

I think Z you may have missed the note of irony in Dr C’s post, still it is nice that he is at least acknowledging us as professionals again.

I personally think everyone should be paid the same no matter what job they do. I mean, do doctors only train for the money? Don’t they actually want to make people well? Are they more deserving of a higher wage than someone with a lower IQ and poorer parents who couldn’t support them through medical school? Or more deserving than someone who does a horrible but completely essential job, like maintaining sewers or collecting rubbish?

Steady on, Dr Crippen’s generated a very reasonable post but several issues are getting blurred in the comments. The crux of Dr Crippen’s post is that he’s frequently stated that nurses’ pay should be better, but that he’s been misrepresented and to be honest, I can see why. On his blog he has consistently stated how nurse pay is poor.

1) There’s also the issue of doctors’ pay vs nurses’ pay.
2) There’s also the issue of nurse roles/quacktitioners.
3) There’s also the role of doctors’ roles (eg GPwSI) as quacktitioners (which Dr Crippen has persistently been equally scathing of).
4) There’s also the issue of doctors renumeration compared to other professionals, eg lawyers.

It may be better for clarity if those 4 points were batted around elsewhere, lest these comments become eiter unclear in commenting on the original post, or a trolling.

So back to the point : Dr Crippen’s consistently said on his blog that nurses are underpaid.
“Dr Crippen a while back, explaining why just under 20 grand is a perfectly adequate salary for a recently-qualified nurse.”
I read his post and infer the opposite, that nursing pay is poor. And that a 2.4% pay rise is insulting. And that a starting nurse can’t reasonably expect to pay for a house/car on their derisory salary. I thought Dr Crippen’s post was all about how woeful nursing salaries are.

Shrink - I tend to agree with OSB, nurses do not need platitudes.

I’m not having a go at Dr Crippen who I admire a great deal actually, but such sentiments belong in the same category as comments about how badly the elderly are treated - self evident, yet little progress is ever made in changing the situation.

One ranking I found placed doctors 2nd for their earnings, while nurses were rated 153rd.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/n....._page_id=2

According to Civitas average consultant pay [2006 figures] was £110,000, while GP partners did even better hitting £113,000.
http://www.civitas.org.uk/nhs/nhsperformance.php

The hours may have improved for junior doctors but pay remains very meagre [to begin with] - I suppose one carrot [for those that can find training posts] is the prospect of being the second best paid profession in the UK ?

In the case of Crippen vs Z, I have perused and scrutinsed said relevant articles and determine as follows:

It may be plausible to suggest the posting of Doc C was of sarcastic intent, against nurses, to imply that any nurse complaining of a 2.4% pay “cut” was being “silly” because nurses don’t have mortgages or living costs as they are too young to have such responsibilities.

However, it is equally plausible the quoted text was originally intended as sarcasm, in favour of nurses, implying that newly qualified nurses would in fact have to meet such living costs and that a 2.4% pay rise is, in effect, a pay cut and is “Crazy”.

Notwithstanding, John does militate (or is it mitigate?) the veracity of his intended sarcasm towards the ‘against nurses’ principle when he further proffers amidst the comments:
There are still plenty of teenagers going into nursing. To be fair, I don’t know the demographics. However, I will bet you all a virtual pint that more than 75% of newly qualified nurses are under 25. Does anyone know the figures.
Thus suggesting he does in fact believe the majority of newly qualified nurses are under 25, which would support the former against nurses sarcasm.

He does not, however, suggest that newly qualified nurses, which he imagines 75% may be up to 25 years old, ought not to be able to afford a house, car or holiday. Which suggests he wasn’t being sarcastic about the age nor the living entitlements of newly qualified nurses, even tho they may be under 25 years old and, by this omission, cannot be held contemptuosly for suggesting one way or another.

Thus, the posting of “Z” was, at worst, a mistaken misrepresentation, not a mendacious misquote and as such does not support Doc C’s accusation of calumny.
At best, it is an accurate degradation of surreptitious and duplicitous misrepresentation of Doc C’s original post.

In the writing styles of both authors, for which some it is my observations that:

JC writes in such duplicitous manner that he retains an opportunity to defend either/or of the potential arguments that he be for or against the nurses pay rise. This is not commended and the decision maker suggests this current accusation and debate is ipso facto to the existence of this observations that the learned doctor is clearly not very good at sarcasm, or perhaps is deceptively so very good it falls to his detriment.

Z writes with direct and succinct accusatory fashion within which no err can be made as to intent of his comments; unless, of course, he too is being most sublimely sarcastic, beyond even that which even the greatly sarcastic Doc C can detect. This is commended yet the decision maker suggest a less vitriolic expose may extol the Doc C to desist from duplcity-sarcasm as it is beyond our meagre nursing comprehension to follow which argument he is making.

Nevertheless, Gallowgate [comments] resourced:
According to the now defunct NMAS (Nursing and Midwifery Admissions Service) website: In 2007, 15226 of accepted applicants were 25 and under and 10260 were 26 and over.

Zarathustra [ibid] further notes:
So, by my maths that’s 59.7% who were 25 or under, well short of Dr C’s 75% claimed (and that’s 25 or under when they’re accepted for training, not when they qualify as nurses).

Ergo, it is my decisions that, regardless of the intent of any comments by anyone, I believe Doc C owes ‘all of us’ a virtual pint.

By the power vested in me, by myself, I hereby order that one virtual pint be posted within one week on the NHSBLogDoctor website with the tag “Cheers! To the wonderful nurses at Mental Nurse”; lest he become, himself, mendacious.

(Sarcasm within the body of the post may be permitted - and is, of course, to be expected)

Hugs

Just read the tags to this post.. tut tut Z.

(LMFAO)

Mr Ian, you have quite made my Sunday.

Shrink, Anyone can pat a dog on the head and forget to feed it. Crippen, the Rants and the arsewipes who occasionally emerge from beneath the rock at DNUK never hesitate to remind us of their intellectual superiority and of how much they could earn in the City if they hadn`t devoted themselves to medicine. As I keep asking, when did self praise become the ultimate recommendation ?. Bright as they are the fact that the public purse is finite seems to completely elude them. This weak, stupid government didn`t want to approach the last election in conflict with the doctors. The public coffers were opened and the medicinal, porcine snout lunged into the trough. The GMC should merge with the Fire Brigades Union and share their dismissive contempt for their public sector bretheren. I`m too thick to work in the City but even I can work out that when the coffers are diminished there will be less left for everyone else. Nurses, traditionally, put everyone else first and receive what`s left in the public sector pay round. At least we should be respected for that.

The issue of respect is where, Shrink, your argument becomes even more pitiful. Fair enough Crippen is anti the likes of GPwSI`s but he doesn`t taunt them with nursey, nursey / bedpan jibes. And Crippen is very clever, he doesn`t do his own dirty work, he will happily orchestrate a barrage of thick as pig shit, stockinged bedwarmer abuse from the loathsome tossers on DNUK before distancing himself and throwing us a bit of toffee. He is intolerant of insubordination from mere nurses and was entirely responsible for intimidating and abusing Nurse Ratchet out of the blogsphere, she only wrote two posts and wasn`t even given a chance to find her feet. That`s why he doesn`t like Mental Nurse, we won`t be intimated and we won`t shut up.

I’m still laughing at the idea that newly qualified doctors are some sort of intellectual elite. Yes, there will be some bright ones and even some supernova-bright ones, but also a great number of fair to middling intellects and a few dullards who just scraped in. Tis the way of the world.

Well, with all his years of training and even more years of experience, I still knew more about Clozapine than our GP, so what a bright spark her turned out to be. No disrespect intended, as he is actually the best doctor we have ever had, which doesn’t say much for the rest. Not that I dislike doctors you understand, even if the first person I ever wanted to kill was a doctor when I was 4. The point I’m trying to make is that they’re not necessarily the most intelligent people, but people apply themselves to whatever is of interest to them. Manners isn’t usually one of them

LOL and what a bright spark I turned out to be! He not her!

A perfectly obvious solution to the “government employee is underpaid” argument is to remove government intervention from the particular sector. No doubt some nurses (who are very good at nursing) would earn lots of money, while those who are not would earn less. If the rate of pay is not perceived to be fair, then employees are free to seek alternative employment. Obviously, socialising anything brings with it questions such as the one discussed here, which have no real answer. In my experience, the extent of holiday allocation and job security make nursing a very attractive and family-friendly proposition, though it must be said that I have often seen people go into because they have no other plans (not that this is limited to nursing!).

/Ignores the fact that removing government intervention in psychiatry would render the discipline rather obsolete.

Ted.