Councils plan to offer 5 Ð to avert strikes

Council leaders want to give local authority workers a 5% pay rise in a bid to see off threatened strike action.

Edinburgh’s Labour leader Cammy Day said the Scottish Government should provide more cash to pay for it but Glasgow City Council’s SNP leader Susan Aitken said a higher offer should already be achievable.

Unions rejected a 3.5% pay offer from local authority body Cosla on Friday. Bin workers from the GMB and Unite unions are set to strike during the Edinburgh Festival, from August 18 until 30. Colleagues at 15 councils will walk out from August 26 to 29 and September 7 to 10.

The Scottish Government said it expected local government to find savings to match a £140 million contribution to help them give staff a bigger pay rise.

Day said: “Many leaders across Scotland have agreed that a minimum pay award should be 5%. We are calling on the Scottish Government, who we know have hundreds of millions of pounds in reserves, to dig deep.”

Aitken added: “I would much rather have seen a bigger offer to be put on the table, but Cosla has made its decision.”

GMB senior organiser, Keir Greenaway, said: “For our members, all they care about is getting a pay rise that will get them through this cost of living crisis.”

Social Justice, Housing and Local Government Minister Shona Robison said it was extremely disappointing that Cosla had not come up with a 5% offer.

patients’ deaths but also if it reduces the need for further large transfusions when they get to hospital, say researchers. The outcome of the trial, being launched in England later this year, is being closely watched by Scots specialists.

Dr Jennifer Laird, consultant haematologist at Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service, said: “The transfusion and trauma community await the outcome of the Swift (Whole Blood in Frontline Trauma) trial currently under way in England, which aims to investigate the clinical and costeffectiveness of whole blood in the pre-hospital setting.

“It’s important for patients, healthcare professionals and blood services that the clinical and cost-effectiveness of prehospital whole blood transfusion is part of a large trial before being rolled out in the NHS.”

Air Ambulance services who transfuse patients use red blood cells and plasma and administer them, one after another. The products weigh down the kit bags that emergency teams carry. The team leading the trial says: “Although there is some evidence of benefit with the use of whole blood, there have been no studies exploring the clinical and cost-effectiveness of pre-hospital administration of whole blood versus the standard care for bleeding trauma patients in the UK.

The research follows a survey of UK Air Ambulance Services where

more than 80% said they would prefer to use whole blood on patients.

Army doctors used whole blood for transfusion in the Second World War and in the Korean and Vietnam wars where there was a desperate need to keep soldiers alive while they transferred them off the battlefield and to military hospitals. During the Vietnam War trauma medics moved to plasma and red cell transfusions.

More than 80% of UK air ambulance services say they want to return to whole blood, followed by red blood cells.

The flying medics say they want to see the results of the two-year trial before it is rolled out by the NHS.

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) says trauma patients will be split evenly into two groups with one being given whole blood and the others the usual red blood cells and plasma. NHSBT says: “Patients’ survival and cost-effectiveness to the NHS will be examined to see what the benefits are.”