This Daily Telegraph article says it all, unedited;
Telegraph.co.uk
Thursday 19 September 2013
More than 10,000 NHS managers have seen their pay soar by 13
per cent in four years, with rises last year at three times the rate of
increases to nurses, official figures disclose
By Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent 19 Sep 2013
The boost
to basic earnings — which can be topped up by bonuses — came as the health
service attempts to make £20 billion in “efficiency savings”. More than 5,000
nursing posts have been lost since the general election.
Nurses
leaders’ said the disclosures were “extremely demoralising” and it was not fair
that the best-paid managers enjoyed generous pay increases when low-paid staff
were struggling to pay bills.
The figures
show that last year, pay for NHS senior managers rose by almost 2 per cent,
taking the average basic salary to £75,759, with earnings of up to £260,000 for
hundreds of trust chief executives.
Meanwhile,
nurses’ earnings rose by just 0.6 per cent, while health visitors took a cut of
0.3 per cent. Although an NHS pay freeze was ordered by the Treasury in 2011-12
and 2012-13, in the years since 2009 close to 11,000 senior managers have seen
their basic earnings rise by an average of 12.9 per cent, the figures from the
Health and Social Care Information Centre show.
Over the
same period, nurses’ pay rose by an average of 7.5 per cent, to an average of
£30, 619. The rises occurred within a period when NHS managers had been
instructed to enforce a pay freeze for all but the lowest-paid staff.
Nevertheless,
generous increases went to bureaucrats in charge of cost-cutting programmes,
which have been drawn up to meet demands from Sir David Nicholson, the head of
the NHS, for £20 billion savings by 2015.
Earlier
this year an investigation by The Telegraph found that more than 7,000 NHS
managers and senior clinicians were on six-figure salaries.
Dr Peter
Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “Front-line
health care staff work exceptionally hard in difficult circumstances to care
for patients with limited resources, and these figures will send
completely
the wrong message about how much their contribution is valued. “It is not too
much to ask that nurses and other frontline staff who do so much to keep the
NHS afloat in increasingly difficult circumstances are treated the same as
their management colleagues.”
He said
many nurses were having difficulties paying the bills after a two year pay
freeze followed by a 1 per cent rise this year. “We are hearing time and again
from nurses who are struggling to keep their heads above water financially as
their pay falls far behind inflation, and finding out that already well paid
senior staff are enjoying these pay rises will be extremely demoralising.”
The figures
show the average NHS worker earned £29,543 in the 12 months to June, 1 per cent
more than the year before. Doctors earned a basic salary of £58,813, with many
receiving bonuses on top. This represented a 1.4 per cent rise on the previous
year and a 5.5 per cent rise on 2009.
Health
visitors were the only group to receive a pay cut, with pay falling by an
average of 0.3 per cent to £34,284.
Separate
figures have found more than 7,800 NHS staff paid over £100,000, with one third
of them earning more than David Cameron's £142,500 salary.
Neil Harris
(a don’t stop till you drop production)
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