Secretary's Corner
June 2009
As a Branch and as a Union we are currently in the process of negotiating and campaigning both locally and nationally on some very important and contentious topics on your behalf.
Locally we are in discussions with the Trusts management on issues such as Dynamic Deployment, ASWs/ECAs, Annual Leave, Student Paramedic Pathways, mealbreaks and foundation Trust status to mention but a few. Locally and nationally we are campaigning in areas such as Technician and Paramedic pay banding, keeping the NHS public and keeping our PTS contracts out of the hands of the private contractors. This is alongside all the usual day to day issues of grievance, disciplinary, policy and procedures, working conditions, Health & Safety etc etc. In the best traditions of Job Description statements – this is not an exhaustive list.
One of the best ways of keeping our members informed of what is going on is via this newsletter. We hope that it is informative and our editor Eric does a fantastic job in putting it all together each month. However, it is a monthly publication and things are happening and changing on an almost weekly if not daily basis at the moment. With this in mind we are going to be trying to keep our website as up to date as we possibly can with any latest news. I would urge all members to make every effort to take a look at the website on a regular basis at www.eeas-unison.com Don’t forget also that members can sign up to our e-news service whereby information can be sent via email to any individual user’s inbox. As a member led Branch we will almost certainly be carrying out further online member consultations similar to the one we trialled before, we are confident that we will be able to sort out the glitches that were experienced in NSC last time and all members will be able to make their views known. These consultations will only be available to Unison members, so to have the chance to have your say – join Unison today.
I would also like to take this opportunity to make a plea; all of this work does tend to fall to a very small number of Branch Officers. With this in mind could I please ask once again that interested members put their names forward as departmental reps (it is a very rewarding role – honest) also, that any local issues are referred to local reps or County Leads in the first instance for a timely response and action. Contact details can be found in this Newsletter and on the Website
And finally, it would appear that depending on where you work in any Trust around the country, the rules on our PTS staff being exempt from using bus lanes in the same way as our colleagues in A&E varies from county to county. Where the use of bus lanes is not allowed by Staff in NES, longer journey times and the knock on effect of missed appointments are having a detrimental outcome for patients and creating difficulties within the NHS system. Unison believes that there is a very strong moral argument for PTS vehicles that serve the community to be exempt from bus lane restrictions across the UK.
Dave Ward, one of our UNISON colleagues and senior PTS stewards based in Oldham has kick started a national campaign aimed at removing any restrictions for the use of bus lanes by any NHS PTS and not-for-profit patient carrying vehicles and has launched an online petition to be sent to Downing Street. It is very easy to sign the partition by simply going online to http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/NHS-TRANSPORT/ and signing in, it took me less than 5 minutes. .
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