Responding to a Health Service Journal report on leaked plans around using recruitment and retention premia to attract workers into NHS technology roles, RCN Director of Legal Services & Member Relations Joanne Galbraith-Marten said:
“In these plans, the NHS shows it’s prepared to do things differently to attract talent to the NHS. When professions struggle to recruit, it sees salary enhancements as a viable option to solve a workforce issue - in this case for roles that are predominantly filled by men.
“We are already formally seeking a recruitment and retention premia for our profession to address chronic nursing workforce shortages in the NHS. There are tens of thousands of nursing vacancies, staff fleeing for better opportunities abroad and patients suffering.
“Our female-dominated profession received the lowest pay award in the public sector last year and this year must be much better to turn things around. By using this mechanism to respond to the labour market in the male-dominated tech sector, they confirm the ability to do it in our safety-critical profession too. The need for a radical overhaul of nursing pay is just as defensible, if not more.”
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Notes to Editors
The Health Service journalist report is here: Leaked national tech workforce plan proposes local pay rises | News | Health Service Journal (hsj.co.uk)
As part of the RCN’s formal submission to the NHS Pay Review Body, which is tasked with making recommendations to the government on wage rises for this year, the College said the government should make additional payments on top of salaries to prevent nursing staff leaving the NHS and tackle an ever-worsening workforce crisis. The sum, which must come in addition to a ‘substantial’ above-inflation pay rise for NHS workers, should go to nursing professionals across all areas and specialties to encourage them to stay working in the service and attract more nurses into the NHS.
The RCN is also calling on the PRB to recommend measures including automatic progression from band 5 to band 6 that is already available to other NHS workers, to create better long-term career prospects for the nursing workforce. Despite being a highly skilled, degree-educated, safety-critical profession, the outdated Agenda for Change (AfC) pay structure means a large proportion of nurses are stuck at Band 5, the lowest pay band for a registered nurse on which they start and end their nursing careers.
