Pay campaign sees 35,000 HCAs and some nurses up-banded

The union Unison provided an update today on its Pay Fair for Patient Care campaign, during a session at its 2024 health conference, being held in Brighton this week.

“What has been so evident in the evidence we’ve seen is that band 5 nurses are working above their band in a lot of areas”

Louise Chinnery

While the campaign has focused on HCAs, up-banding agreements have also been won for some nurses, phlebotomists, ward clerks, security officers and reception staff.

It saw its first victory in 2022 and since then at least 35,000 HCAs have been successfully upgraded from band 2 to 3, after proving they have been performing duties associated with the higher band.

In some cases, HCAs have gone on strike in their organisations to secure their deals, as previously reported by Nursing Times.

HCAs from Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust were among those who took strike action and, as a result, have obtained an upbanding deal.

Two HCAs from the trust – one based in Luton and the other in Bedford – spoke at the conference to share how they went about organising their local campaign.

It started with HCAs completing a survey about the duties they were performing and it emerged that “a lot of it was clinical… band 3 work”, explained Luton HCA Emma Hunter.

The HCAs then submitted a grievance to the trust and a meeting was subsequently held with the chief executive.

“I think they had expected about 30 of us to turn up, we had this little room, but there were actually 650 of us,” said Ms Hunter.

However, an agreement could not be reached, so the HCAs moved on to industrial action. A 48-hour strike was held in March 2024 and, as a result, the trust has now agreed to a deal.

“We managed to sway them with only two days strike,” said Bedford HCA Bev Findlay. “They called us back in. And obviously they then had to come to some sort of agreement.

She added: “It was a hard slog on that last day. They were in and out of the room every five minutes.”

Ms Findlay said one of the points of contention was for bank workers to be included in the deal. “They didn’t want to consider the bank who are very, very important in the NHS,” she said.

“There’s no getting away from that. We can’t manage without them. So eventually, they then did say that they would include the bank. So they got something too, so we all got something.”

However, Ms Findlay noted that the deal was yet to be finalised and warned that strike action would “reappear” if the agreement fell through.

“We managed to sway them with only two days strike”

Bedford HCA

She now wanted to see the campaign picked up in other areas. “Everybody needs to make sure they go out, they get their staff who are on band 2 and let’s move everybody across the nation into band 3 for the hard work they’re doing,” she said.

At Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, HCAs took 61 days of strike action, the conference heard.

Louise Chinnery, a national officer for Unison who helps lead on Pay Fair for Patient Care, said the campaign had gone from “strength to strength” over the past year.

Ms Chinnery noted how in Northern Ireland in particular, good work was being done to get nurses rebanded, both from band 5 to 6 and in some cases from band 6 to 7.

She said: “Our Northern Ireland colleagues are smashing it on doing nurse rebanding – all sorts of specialities… really doing a brilliant job.”

Emma Hunter and Bev Findlay, second and third from left. Louise Chinnery, far right

Meanwhile in some areas, phlebotomists have been successfully rebanded from band 2 to 3.

In terms of HCAs, she urged them to think about next steps in their campaigning, adding: “Healthcare assistants are now a powerful force in our union and in their employers.”

Last year Unison launched a national HCA network and Ms Chinnery said, through that, there would be “an opportunity for HCAs to organise themselves and make some national demands”.

For example, she noted that “we’ve got a shortage of nurses in the UK, why are our HCAs not being given the proper opportunity to go and train as nurses if they want to?”.

Although she highlighted that the HCA role was also “absolutely essential” in its own right in facilitating the functioning of wards.

The national JEG is currently reviewing national nursing and midwifery job profiles, and Ms Chinnery said the profiles would be going out to consultation “fairly soon”.

From the work done on the national profiles, it had been clear that many nurses were currently working above their pay grade, said Ms Chinnery.

“What has been so evident in the evidence we’ve seen is that band 5 nurses are working above their band in a lot of areas, either because they’ve learned very specialist skills, or they’re taking charge of wards but not getting paid for it,” she said. “So that’s going to be a really big opportunity for us.”

More generally in relation to job evaluation, Ms Chinnery said the Pair Fair for Patient Care campaign had demonstrated problems and disparities in the way the job evaluation scheme was being implemented locally.

“There is a lack of awareness among senior leaders and senior managers in the NHS about what is job evaluation for,” she said. “It’s to ensure equal pay.”

While the new nursing profiles are not expected until later this year, Ms Chinnery said there was “nothing stopping us starting doing rebanding of nurses now”.