Enforced Changes

The Trust has issued a Staff Notice stating that they intend to enforce changes to the ECA Scope of Practice and meal break windows across A&E. The notice also talks about UNISON being unable to agree to changes. These changes are referred to as ‘common sense changes’, however they are in fact fundamental changes to agreements reached through negotiation.

The Trust were proposing to make only 68 ECA’s per year into a band 4 role, two below the top of band 4 pay scale and in return they wanted to revisit the parts of the Operational Redesign that you, the members, asked us to negotiate. At only 68 ECA’s a year been trained to band 4 level this would take over 10 years to train our ECA current workforce. They wanted us to agree to the following things that we knew would be unacceptable to our members;

• All band 5 AEMT’s to be de-skilled and down banded to the proposed band 4 role.
• Changes to the ECA Scope of Practice that the trust is now trying to enforce.
• Changes to the meal break window that the trust are now enforcing.
• Changes to the relief policy which would mean staff being allocated shifts outside of any current agreement, i.e. short notice and any station
• Forced movement of Staff from current stations
• 24/7 stand by at non facilitated points
• Support the use of St Johns Ambulance to aid the delivery of service
• Recommendation from the Branch Committee that you rescind the recent vote of no confidence in the Chief Executive and Trust senior managers.

We feel that it is self-explanatory as to why UNISON couldn’t agree. Even if their proposals had been reasonable then we would still have needed to put them to you for acceptance, it was clear that they wanted an answer yesterday, it was the trust who walked away from the negotiations and who are now showing their contempt for partnership working.

The situation the trust finds themselves in is down to changes this management team have made, UNISON did not believe that a 5 and 3 model would work and made that clear to them, despite that they insisted on going ahead. Members may have more respect if they held their hands up and admitted they had got it wrong rather than taking the stance they have.

At a meeting yesterday that the management team called, they graced us with less than an hour of discussion with one executive coming across as arrogant and showing us complete contempt. The meeting was then adjourned and the executive team left, they then did not even have the courtesy of coming back into the meeting room following the adjournment for further negotiation because UNISON had indicated that we could not agree to the wholesale changes they were proposing.

The changes to the meal breaks mean that there is potential for staff to be working 9 hours without a break, or even on some shifts having no meal break at all, which will not benefit staff or patient care.

We believe the changes to the ECA Scope of Practice are putting staff and patients at risk, not all ECA staff have had training to use the ‘advisory mode’ on the LifePak, they were never trained to work as part of a crew, they have no experience working without a qualified clinician and many of them do not feel comfortable doing so.

Our advice to ECA’s is that you stick to the agreed scope of practice, with the exception previously agreed, that as a double ECA crew you only attend where a RRV is on scene and requesting back up and the RRV clinician must then travel with the patient. The scope of practice does not allow ECA’s ‘To respond as a “First Responder” to Red calls.’

If the trust goes ahead with these changes tomorrow we will be balloting staff from Monday with a proposal of industrial action in line with previous member’s mandate.

In the meantime if this is how things are going to work in an Aspirant Foundation Trust perhaps we all need to consider carefully whether it is an organisation we want to be members of.  At the next branch committee meeting we will discuss the issue of asking members to pull out on mass.

Could all members please ensure that their home addresses are up to date on the UNISON data base in preparation for potentially going to a full postal ballot.

This can be done by calling 08000 857 857