AMICUS members at Peterborough District hospital have voted unanimously to take strike action over the way their jobs have been banded under the new NHS pay scheme, Agenda for Change. They plan four one-day strikes, starting on Monday 27 November, combined with a ban on overtime and call-outs.
The eleven workers are all skilled maintenance staff, such as plumbers and electricians, who work as part of a thirty-nine strong team providing an essential service needed to keep medical equipment and the hospital as a whole working. They also cover emergencies at Peterborough's other hospital, the Edith Cavell hospital, and at Stamford Hospital.
For the last six months these workers have patiently pursued an appeal against the banding of their posts based on the fact that workers doing the same jobs in most other Trusts were banded a grade higher, meaning that Peterborough's most skilled and highly trained maintenance workers were getting on average about £3000 a year less than their counterparts elsewhere.
The patience of these AMICUS members finally ran out when, having had their appeals rejected, they received leaked information to the effect that the panel who assessed their jobs had actually upheld the appeals only for "consistency checking" to overturn that decision. What kind of consistency checking could that be, they wondered, when there is no one else in the Trust to check the posts against and equivalent posts in other Trusts have already been banded higher? In fact, their employer, Peterborough and Stamford Hospital's NHS Foundation Trust, had completely ignored both the national profile for this kind of job and the advice of the Strategic Health Authority.
At the same time that this slight of hand is being perpetrated against AMICUS members, the NHS Trust is planning new cuts: 47 beds are to be cut from the District Hospital – including some from the orthopaedic, haematology, gynaecology and elderly wards – and 43 medical posts will be lost. Of course, the Trust is very pleased with itself, crowing that it "only" has debts of about a million quid.
Perhaps this is all we can expect from a Foundation Trust. These Trusts, which are part of the privatisation wedge being driven into the NHS, see themselves as essentially private businesses whose aim is be entrepreneurial and pursue profit. Foundation Trust Chief Executives like to use that kind of language to describe the brave new world of PFI and job cuts that they see before them.
So, this is how financial management is conducted in NHS Foundation Trusts: by slashing services and swindling staff!
