These strikes....

Primary Care Trust.

The PFI thing that costs a hell of a lot of money was used to build loads of more local surgeries. And the intention was, that these were to be used to house smaller and local services in the communities, rather than everyone piling to the main hospitals.

For example, x rays.

 

This is where misinformation from rail bosses and the government is swallowed by people not willing to do proper research.
As watcher states rail companies lost nothing through covid and are losing nothing on strike days..... we're making up their shortfall through government funding. Our taxes are making sure the shareholders profits remain the same. Please don't swallow everything your told by msm.

 

I'm sorry but I just don't believe this. The majority of an agency nurses pay will go to the agency. Tales of an agency nurse getting £46 an hour after the agencies cut are pie in the sky...... if it were true surely all nurses would just rag in and do agency work.

 

Ta. I thought a PCT was an admin function and didn't realise they had their own buildings

 

But even that means the NHS Nurse would be on £4 ph

 

To be fair depends on the role a basic Nurse no chance but a Nurse practitioner can earn over £30 an hour. So a Bank Nurse gets more would push her towards £300 a day.

 

You've lost me pal. I'm on about a basic nurse that works on the ward etc. Not sure what a bank nurse or a nurse practitioner are so can't really comment. I know there are pay grades in the nhs and would i be right in thinking a grade 4 is a normal nurse and gets between £24 and £26k depending on experience?? That Dawson bloke could probably help out with figures but I'm on ignore so he won't see this.

 

I’m not sure what role they do . It’s a ex forces pal . He’s got houses in Milton Keynes that he rents to nurses. They earn great money he says

 

Bank Nurse is basically an Agency Nurse, Practitioner not 100% what her role is but it’s quite senior.

 

Top of band 3 is 22k so 26k sounds right.

 

Between 23k & 26k (with 6+ years)according to this site.

https://www.nurses.co.uk/careers-hub/nursing-pay-guide/

 

And see how many of his cronies benefit when the war is over, with cushy numbers in Ukranian enterprises like grain and mineral exports.

 

Where have you seen that , drop the demand for driver only trains and they’d be back at work

 

Sun or mail would be my guess

 

On the Penistone Line it must have stopped ages ago as I cannot remember the last time I saw a conductor on the way in to Huddersfield. It's either pay at the platform machine or get a promise to pay ticket to pay when you arrive. It's super rare to see a conductor come down the carriages. I do agree that trains shouldn't be just the driver though.

 

To be honest, over the Christmas period I wouldn’t be surprised by that figure at all. I worked a night shift through an agency at Great Ormond Street on New Year’s Eve 1997 and was paid over £30 per hour then. I’m sure that figure will have gone up quite a bit for specialist nurses. The agency would add a commission of between 15% and 30% on top of the nurse’s pay. So at £30 per hour the total cost to the ward would be £34.50-£39. The majority goes to the nurse, not the other way round.

A nurse bank is a completely different thing. The nurses would get paid as per the usual NHS grades, depending on what level they are working at. There’s no commission or anything on top of that because the nurse bank is run by the hospital itself. The majority of nurse bank shifts are carried out by their existing staff doing extra shifts. A nurse in a NHS hospital wouldn’t be allowed to do a shift in the same hospital for an external agency. You might get some nurses who don’t have a full time contract anywhere signing up to a nurse bank, because whilst the pay is nowhere near as good as it would be for an agency nurse, nurses from the bank would always get priority when shifts are handed out.

I quit my full-time NHS A&E job when the Reds got promoted to the Premiership, because I was fed up of all my mates being able to get to every game, whereas I had to beg and swap to get days off for matches. Getting Saturdays off wasn’t easy. I’d got the day off for the Bradford game, but just couldn’t find anyone to swap with me, had we needed something from the Oxford game. One of my colleagues suggested I joined an agency, as I could then then pick my shifts. I’d never thought of this, but I spoke with one of them and it seemed a doddle. I bet there isn’t anybody else who left the NHS cos they didn’t want to miss any Reds matches.

As I specialised in both A&E and paediatrics, getting shifts was easy and the pay was great too. The pay was highest if I did paeds though, so the agency tended to give me shifts at Great Ormond Street, etc, as the contracts manager looking after me got more commission himself if I did a paeds shift. I preferred A&E though, so I joined the nurse bank at the Whittington in Archway. The pay was less, but I enjoyed it more, so I did a mixture of bank shifts there and agency shifts in paediatrics. There was one shift on the A&E at the Whittington where there was one charge nurse, one permanent staff nurse, me and then half a dozen agency nurses who had never set foot in the department before. We just about got by, as I could cover triage and the other staff nurse covered resus, and we just had to keep watching over what the others were doing.

Certainly in the late 90s, the NHS in London would have collapsed without agency nurses. I ended up working in the office, taking over looking after all the paediatric nurses and eventually managing the office. 90% of my paeds nurses were Aussie or Kiwis. They didn’t want full-time positions, as they were using London as a base for all their European travels. You’d be amazed at how many of them set themselves up as limited companies though. They didn’t get paid any more doing this, but avoided a lot of tax.

There was a big drive by the NHS in the early 2000s to move away from using nursing agencies and they created their own sort of agency, but they struggled, because they weren’t paying the nurses enough to attract all the Aussies/Kiwis who made up the vast majority of specialist agency nurses. I left the industry about this time and got a job in the City, because filling staffing gaps on a temporary basis was one thing, but I then had to start negotiating recruitment fees should any of the agency nurses accept permanent roles on the wards we’d placed them on. I could see why the agency would have that as part of their terms, but I didn’t want to be having those conversations with nurse managers, especially from units that I myself had worked on.

But even though the hourly rate is better for agency nurses, most NHS nurses wouldn’t want to leave and join an agency. Getting shifts isn’t guaranteed, there’s no sick pay, getting paid leave is a hassle, with the rules differing from agency to agency, you’d lose membership to the NHS pension scheme, which is one of the best around, and most nurses prefer to have a permanent role. When I managed the agency I don’t think I had any nurses that had left the NHS to join us specifically for the money. In fact, I was one of the only nurses on the books who had quit a NHS role with a view to making the agency work my primary source of income and that wasn’t for the money, I just wanted to be able to watch the Reds. Clint Marcelle’s goal changed my career path!

 

There was conductors on the Barnsley to Leeds and leeds to Harrogate train last Saturday .

 

Just had a nosey on www.nationalrail.co.uk for the Penistone Line one an hour today trains. It must be a strike day in all but name as five today have been cancelled and another three delayed. The first train of the day tomorrow is already showing as cancelled. Fine for those who don't use trains or are retires so it doesn't affect them.

 

RMT reveals that the Government handed fees to the private train operators equivalent to nearly 7p in every pound spent by rail passengers during the first year of the pandemic.

RAIL UNION RMT today revealed that for the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Government gave the private train operators over £150m in fees for profits which the Union estimates to be equivalent to nearly 7p of every pound spent by rail passengers during the same period.

Under the terms of their Covid-19 Emergency Measures Agreements and Emergency Recovery Measures Agreements the private train operators receive fees, that can be used to fund profits. The latest figures quietly published by the DfT show that from March 2020 – March 2021, the private train operators in England received £154m in fees.

Despite its continued support for the big business train operators, the Government is subjecting rail workers, who were on the frontline throughout the pandemic, to a pay freezes and passengers to fare rises. RMT calculates that the money paid to the private companies for the first year of the pandemic could instead have easily funded an inflation level pay rise for rail workers and allowed millions more to be reinvested in improving the rail network for passengers.

 

Say they give them the pay they want, it will result in rises in train fares to cover it. Our trains are already overpriced and useless.