WINNING WAR?
Nurses paid £12 an hour to give jabs ...as dentists pocket £66!
NURSE vaccinators are furious after discovering pharmacists, dentists and opticians are earning more than £500 a day more for doing the same job.
Union bosses claim nurses are being paid £12 an hour, while pharmacists, GPs, dentists, and optometrists are being given £230 per three-and-a-half hour session.
They are categorised as independent contractors with maximum shifts of up to three sessions per day, which works out at £66 an hour.
Unison warned the discrepancy was forcing nurses to walk away from the vaccination process, which they said would slow down the rollout.
The pay rates have been set nationally by the Government, and Unison raised the issue last month.
It comes after a memo was distributed to vaccinators in Glasgow about ‘unprofessional behaviours and attitudes of some staff towards vaccinator colleagues’.
The email, seen by The Herald newspaper, warned the behaviour was ‘unacceptable and will not be tolerated’. It was sent by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s depute
‘They should be apologising’
director of HR and said to be an attempt to quash tensions over pay, saying ‘everyone is working towards the same cause’.
One nurse described the situation as ‘obscene’ and said it felt like staff were being told to ‘put up or shut up’. She said: ‘To be sent something like that from HR – they should be apologising for the disparity in pay or saying, “We’re trying to address it”, not telling people to basically behave and be quiet.
‘We’re doing exactly the same thing but we’ve been doing it for years and sometimes we’re having to show them what to do.’
Anne Thomson, an MS nurse from Prestwick, Ayrshire, returned from retirement to help out with the immunisation programme.
She said: ‘I was happy being back at work, but then you hear the person that you’re sharing a table with is getting paid five times more than you to do exactly the same thing.’
Willie Duffy, regional organiser for health at Unison, said: ‘The potential problem for government is that if our members walk away from this vaccination process they’ll never get it done – there wouldn’t be enough independent contractors.’
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: ‘All staff employed to work on the programme are paid in accordance with nationally set terms and conditions and are working to agreed job roles which come with specified rates of pay.’