NHS managers are valued above nurses
I AM a consultant nurse with more than 40 years of experience. While I understand how desperate many of my fellow nurses feel, I don’t believe striking is the right approach.
The people most impacted are patients and the nursing staff left to provide a skeleton service. Patients don’t deserve to be used as pawns in a dispute. I worked through the nursing strikes of the 1980s and endured being called a scab, which was frightening. I couldn’t understand why my striking colleagues believed there would be a benefit in leaving a few nurses to struggle on and face the risks alone.
In the past, striking was used to bring to the public’s attention a state of inequity. Today, this can be achieved in other more innovative ways, such as focused advertisements. Couldn’t nurses withdraw their willingness to do overtime or work through their breaks? What if they refuse to engage in tick-box exercises that the Government depends on to assess how hospitals are performing? What they shouldn’t do is put patients at risk physically or psychologically. The Agenda for Change pay scale, rated from one to nine, governs how NHS staff are remunerated. This statutory framework for pay and conditions was introduced in 2004. What is noticeable is how little patient contact is valued and the fact that managers are over-rewarded. Most nurses don’t climb the scale any higher than a band six. Managers, some of whom have no formal qualifications in healthcare, will expect to be paid in band eight. Despite the fact they often have no professional accountability or clinical responsibility, they are allocated a pay scale much higher than a nurse with a degree and years of experience. A ward sister qualified for more than ten years, trained in trauma nursing and in charge of a large multidisciplinary team and running an A&E department would be a band seven. Regardless of the pay settlement nurses may receive, they will remain poor relatives in the NHS and won’t be adequately recognised for their valuable contribution.
The Government can’t give the nurses a 19 per cent pay rise because, due to Agenda for Change, this would be given automatically to all NHS staff.
Pat Cullen, the General Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal College of Nursing, would be better investing her time in challenging this unfair system. She should be helping the public to understand that it’s not just the Government keeping salaries low for nursing staff, but the rigid NHS pay structure that does not acknowledge their skills.