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how do I accept that a doctor earns more than double what I do?

I'm a nurse and oversaw a doctor checking his bank statements: his salary is a bit more than twice what I earn.

This is not a particularly productive doctor, if you listen to several doctors and nurses where I work at. Just today I overheard a group of 3 female doctors ranting about him and how all he does is sitting and playing with his phone, always redirecting us nurses to talk to the other doctors. I was surprised, because I never expected to find so much drama between doctors, them being much more educated than nurses and I never expected doctors, specially female doctors, to use that kind of language.

This lazy doctor earns more than double my salary. It's depressing.

But I also feel like a loser, because even those ranting doctors earn more than twice what I do... and they get to sit for longer than I do.

Regretting my life choices.

Maybe the sane choice here would be to study or to get a certification that means a higher salary?

81 comments
  • Are you an RN or a Doctor of Nursing? If you’re an RN he has many more years of schooling than you. That alone will get him a higher salary. If you’re a Dr of Nursing then I’d go talk to your boss or start looking for another job.

    Wages aren’t really about how much work you do, if it were then the janitor would earn the highest wages in the hospital.

  • You'll go crazy if you dwell on this. The corporate world is the same way. Generally speaking, the less actual work a person does, the more they tend to get paid. It's a tale as old as time.

  • Think you probably went into the wrong career if your aim was to earn a lot of money, if wages are similar to the UK.

    Even if they somehow got sacked for being lazy or whatever, it doesn’t affect your salary, so I wouldn’t really obsess about it? It obviously takes a lot more training to become a doctor and that’s why they’re paid better. Along with the massive responsibility. I’m sure it’s a stressful job and it could be that those other doctors just don’t like that doctor and so are talking shit about them. You don’t monitor this doctor the whole day (if you do then it sounds like you’re not doing your job very well), so you can’t really say how he spends all his time.

    Maybe he’s just coasting now, having done the hard stuff. But he had to do the hard work beforehand to get qualified. But yeah if you wanna be a doctor and think you can do it then make that your aim I guess?

    Of course you could earn more money doing another job completely unrelated to healthcare if you trained up and progressed enough.

    If you enjoy your job then I wouldn’t worry. If you don’t then try to retrain.

  • Eh, imagine how the nurse's assistants feel. A lot of that tier of medical care end up on disability before retirement age, after years of dealing with literally being shit on.

    We're all trapped in a capitalist hell. It doesn't do any good for us (as in the individual) to dwell on whether or not other workers make more or less than we do. And doctors in industrialized healthcare are labor, not management or the owners. Only the ones that break free of things and open their own practice that's independent are partially outside of labor.

    But, if you look at the system as it is, doctors get extra rewards once they're fully allowed to practice because they spend a major amount of their life and youth in specific studying and training instead of making income. They're usually so deep into student debt that it won't be paid off for decades. Their specialist level of training means that they have to preserve their energy and time to be able to work later in life than they might otherwise.

    Nursing is kind of in between blue and white collar work. Doctors are almost always white collar. Low physical demands, but high energy/time demands, with high consequences for minor errors at times.

    It isn't that they don't deserve the pay they get. It's that everyone should be getting paid very well in a high risk job. If capitalism is in place, that isn't going to happen; we're treated like a resource instead of people. But within that framework, someone with extensive skill and education is a more valuable, and more scarce resource.

    My advice? Unionize. Nurses have more power than they think. It's a skilled profession that takes large numbers of people to keep the machine grinding along. Don't worry about the doctor, worry about making your job more respected and valued. Be pissed at the system, and work to change it. It's the only way that profit driven industries will realize they can only be parasites to an acceptable degree.

    But, yeah, it's always going to help if you increase your education, and thus your value to the machine. If it's a low cost add-on to your degree/license, even better.

81 comments