Received from: HCSA
In late 2020, the government published the long-awaited report into the gap in pay in medicine due to an individual’s sex, which shone welcome light on the career-long inequalities facing women hospital doctors. Its recommendations were meaningful and wide-ranging.
Congress is however dismayed that the government has to date resisted calls to carry out a similar exercise to investigate the causes of, and issue recommendations to remedy, the ethnicity pay gap within the medical profession.
Congress notes that this gap is particularly visible among the most senior grades, where a recent study by the Nuffield Trust showed non-white hospital consultants earning around 5 per cent less than their white peers.
However, there is also significant overrepresentation of BME doctors in lower-paid medical grades.
Congress believes that a complex range of factors have led to this inequality, both in financial terms and in terms of career opportunity, and that this issue must be taken seriously by the government, its drivers properly assessed, and remedial action taken to correct this unjust imbalance.
Congress calls on the General Council to support the campaign to close the ethnicity pay gap in medicine and lobby for an independent government-commissioned review to make recommendations so that all hospital doctors, no matter their ethnic background, have an equal opportunity to advance through the medical profession.
Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association
Amendment
Insert new paragraph 5:
“Congress also recognises that there is a significant ethnicity pay gap for Black workers classed under medical and non-medical grades in the NHS, and that Black, Asian and minority ethnic workers are more likely to work in lower paid roles in social care.”
In the final paragraph, after “in medicine” insert “and allied professions,”
GMB