If you’re at the beginning of your fledgling career, or well established in the world of work and looking for a change, it’s well worth considering the NHS. The Health Service has been in the news at the moment over pay cuts and long hours imposed by a government that seems sceptical about it’s worth, if not actually hostile to it’s existence but the tide appears to be turning with deals being met, and regardless, the NHS is a huge employer with many different jobs away from the spotlight and political football of junior doctors contracts.
The NHS is one of the UK’s largest employers, with nearly one and half million employees overall, and these span a huge area from front line nurses and doctors, to more backroom specialists like sonographers or those working in mammography jobs, both at the level of trainees and right up to consultants. Even this broad spread of clinical roles ignores the immense army of support workers, from orderlies to HR workers to procurement specialists to keep up the constant flow of supplies the clinical machine requires to tend to the health of a nation.
Working for the NHS also comes with enough benefits to make it a serious consideration. Whatever area of the health service you work in, at the basic level you receive twenty seven days of holiday per year, in addition to bank and public holidays, and this rises to thirty three days a year after ten years of service – the NHS is keen to retain the expertise of staff in the long term.
There are also some great financial incentives to working for the NHS: you have access to robust, well founded pension scheme, unless you specifically choose to opt out of it, and the stability of having more than a million paying into the pot makes it a good option to bank on in the long term.
NHS workers also have access to financial assistance when they’re looking to buy a house, with interest free loans helping to lift the burden for prospective buyers and those falling into the ‘key worker’ scheme receiving even more assistance.
Finally, for this article at least, the NHS provides generous childcare facilities most often built into the hospitals and surgeries the workers serve. This is a great recognition and support of the workers who keep the National Health Service propped up: they don’t just deserve the support, the NHS is also anxious to remove as many barriers as possible to their return to work when they’re ready!
