Depends on his/her job description.
Between 1 and 9 but I some how doubt it will be towards the top end unless who ever wrote it is very generous.
I think people should forget the old MTO scales and trying to guess what the new one AfC pay band will be, as people doing similar jobs but with different job descriptions can easily be on different grades.
Robert

I'm worried that a great deal of the medical electronics community pick up on singular points within afc without studying the official full documentation, and dont place those ideas in context with the rest of the document.
ie people are picking isolated procedures from the annexes, which dont apply to all, only to special cases that wont directly benefit from the main core of afc procedure and generic profiling.

People get a bee in their bonet from speculation or inaccurate summuries and interputations. Like the wording of an individuals job discription, well surely that will only come into play with a small number of 'specailists' who wont fit within the generic profiles. Remember your job discription is not your profile, and profile weightings are determined from a pre-written scoring table, you tick and score not write.

There will be a number of people who will need individual profiling(study of written job description), but the majority of us do occupy generic jobs (not to say they are all identical), and at first sight the agreed profiles of feb 2004 look after us very well, with allowance for brownie point jobs (mto3***)to fit in on a spine point above the generic weighted grade spine point range within a band.

With most ebme staff fitting into the statical analysis that approx 40% of NHS staff will receive a raise of over £500 and in some cases, 10% will receive £1500-£2000.

Please comment on the following generic gardings from www.dh.gov.uk as agreed in feb 04, as they seem more generous than most seem to preceive they will be intitled to from the generic profiling:

Band 4 medcial engineer (entry level)
(is this not ato-mto1) £15-£18.5

Band 5 medcial eng tech / medical phy tech
(the profile suggests mto2) £18k-£21.5k-£23.5k

Band 6 specialist med eng tech/spec med phy tech
(profile suggest mto3 with room for mto3 upto *** to be weighted at top end of band)
£21.5k-£26k-£29K

band 7 med eng section manger/ med phy tech sec man. £26k-?-£34.5k
(profile suggests mto 4 weighted lower end of band and mto 5 weighted higher end of band)

all weighting scores held the profiles in centre of the band below the upper gate allowing star point jobs to fit beyond the upper gate.


It is still very important for use all to monitor are banding assignments and for the mto5 to ensuring correct grading without being timid and under valuing the indivivdual.

I urge you to read the official documentation and not to relie solely on summaries and third party interuptations.

Cliff,
The scoring is done by an evaluation panel not by the post holder. It is not allowed for a person on the panel to be in the same department as the post holder therefore we will be judged by people who do not know our jobs. The only information this panel will have is our job description. They do not just say "You are a med tech so I match you with the appropriate profile". They first look at your job description, then mark it then see if any profile has similar points. If your job description is not good enough and you score too few points you will get matched to a profile that is below your current post and so get lower wages.
AfC is not a simple matching exercise between existing jobs and predone profiles as you seem to imply.
Be very careful you are not marked down through complacancy and a poor job description.
Robert

Cliff do you honestly think that the trusts have enough money to give most of the staff wage rises of the magnitude you have mentioned here. I am a MTO 3 on the top of the scale i.e £23.9K. There is no way that they will put me on the scale with a ceiling of £29K. Most trusts are heavily in debt and will use AFC as a way of cutting staff wages.
Band 4 will equate to an MTO2, Band 5 = MTO3, Band 6 = MTO4 and Band 7 = MTO 5.
I hope I'm wrong but dont hold your breath for these mythical wage rises.

Hi
I dont think the majority will receive massive pay rises and I accept we cant be complancent and do strongly promote carefull scutiny of forms and proposals put forward, but what I would say dont just read someones elses appraisals, read the offical documents and use their oppomistic appearance to our benefit, dont just be a 100% screptic.
Get the managers studying facts and get on ball, dont just wait and see, like a lot are actually doing.

And correct me if I'm wrong but you wont get an indepenant appraisal unless requested. Hence managers have to be aware and on the ball to get an independant appraisal where someone may loose out, dont assume all will get to go before a panel for assessment.
Also I dont think I have got this 100% correct but within a band, you wont be top out at the top of that band, only at the top point of the waited score, as your waited score will form a range within a band, also the gates will form barriers, hence controlling you and your advancement (from mto4 to mto5)and the trusts budget, hence you get mto4 and mto5 or mto3 and specialist mto3*** on the same band, but in a different waited score range.Hence you wont jump from 24K to 29K.But I'm oppomistic you wont loose and hopefully will recieve some token raise you wouldnt otherwise have received. Thats if your manager is good at their job.
Please fed back.

I'm sorry Cliff but I will have to correct you, I think you have got it wrong.

If you read the Final proposed agreement it is expected that you will reach the top of your band, unless there are serious deficiencies in your performance.

The gateways are where you need to of achieved set out goals with relation to KSF. (Knowledge and Skills Framework.) This however does not come in to effect until 2006.

You can appeal against your Banding if you have additional information to add from one of the criteria. This entails a lengthy questionnaire, this is called a JAQ (40 pages) It is an in-depth questionnaire about what you do and what you are responsible for.

All Amicus members be aware, voting on A4C will take place between Oct-Nov. Contact your National officers to make sure you have up to date information.

The handbooks on AfC are very confusing and vague. When we first went through them we were certain that what would happen was more or less as Cliff has said - that you would be on your own "personal" pay band within one of the major bands. So if you had a general technician who transferred onto the bottom of Band 5 and a specialist technician who transferred onto a point near to the top of Band 5, the general technician could never catch up with the specialist because he would be constrained within his own private sub-band.

This seemed to make sense - otherwise there was a real danger that all structure would disappear within a few years and everyone would end up at the top of Band 5 (providing they were fully complying with their own job description) and the specialist technician would be quite justifiably miffed !

Unfortunately, all the latest information seems to suggest that everyone on a pay band has the oportunity to go right to the top, as long as they fully meet the requirements of their own job description.

It's going to be interesting trying to manage a department where the technicians who had taken on additional responsibility - like servicing life support equipment - are paid the same as a technician who services nebulisers and flowmeters. It's likely that the job descriptions will get torn up and the specialists will say - "why should I take on the extra responsibility ?" The job might offer them more job satisfaction, but people take on responsibility (and stress) in order to earn more money.

That's why we're all here, isn't it ?

With AfC it seems to me that you will need the majority to be optimistic that they will personally be better off or at least have opportunities that previously didn't exist for the vote to succeed. Why vote for change if you only feel you'll end up with the same and risk a pay cut. So if you were cynical you may suspect the Department of Health would resort to tactics of hinting to various groups within the Health Service the potential higher wages from AfC. If you see pay scales with a top way above your current wage you say "no I can't believe that', but you still think "Mmm?'.

It is estimated that over 90% of staff will benefit from an immediate pay increase.

Some 10% of Staff will see their total pay increase by at least 2,000 a year.

The pay of around 7.5% of Staff will be protected.

Taken from the Department of Health site, Review of experience in early implementer sites. There is a really impressive graph as well with very convincing data points, though they are estimated.

How can they calculate 90% get this much more and 10% get that much more unless they've already decided what their going to pay over 90% of us. Which makes the process of writing JD's a pointless exercise for us, but a useful tool to get the NHS Staff nailed down on responsibly. But then again the extra money sounds very optimistic unless you suspect the early implementer sites are made a little better off to sell the scheme.

Adrian.

Roy, interesting analogy;
I suppose you are one the managers the NHS are proud to have at the helm. I’m sure you encourage your staff to learn new skills, apply their ability to take on more responsibility to make a more efficient and resourceful department.

No?

It sounds to me as if you are a firm believer in “dead mans shoes.”

It is one of the main objectives of A4C to motivate staff, help develop themselves so that they can make a difference to the provision of healthcare, improve the professionalism of their department and lead to “Patients” having a better experience of the NHS.

Roy, why don’t you ask the patient on a nebuliser what they think life support equipment is? There answer will be an unequivocal, “this is!”

OR

In ITU, tell the patients family that the flow meter isn’t anything to do with life support, they’ll tell you that your “Barking.”

You could endeavor to promote your staff as highly specialised, you could motivate them to take on more responsibility and conceivably attain Band 6 status.

All of this will take a lot of work; the modernisation of the health service is a massive undertaking, we all need to take a fresh approach, remove our blinkered vision and embrace the New Look NHS.

Don’t worry, before your staff can reach the top of a band you have to go through a gateway.
Fortunately for the staff in the staff in your Department
The requirements to go through the gateway are achievable.

Going back to Paul Robbins initial posting - one thing that confuses me, considering that no R&R payments have been made is that MTO3 == Band 5. I can only assume, based on Paul's comments, that the technician in question was one or perhaps two increments below the top of the MTO3 scale (assuming AfC grading at the top of Band5) otherwise R&R would surely have to apply in this case.

Another thing that puzzles me is that to grade one MTO3, with enhancements, onto one band with significantly greater prospects of progression (Band6) than another MTO3, without enhancements, then the job descriptions that were matched or evaluated would surely have to be significantly different to justify it.

Paul wrote:

How do you place such value on two or three increments on the MTO scale (£2000/£3000 p.a. between MTO3 and MTO3***/MTO3***) when the difference in potential earnings under AfC, between the top of Band5 and the top of Band6, is so great (potentially £7,000+ between top of Band5 and top of Band6)? Is this correct - I'm working from memory here.

Something is a bit askew if you ask me - the sad indicator is the MTO3s position after AfC in my opinion - the MTO3 is the real loser out of all this (in potential earnings/rewards and the initial loss at transition to AfC- certainly if currently at the top of MTO3).


Looks like an unrealistically high value is being placed on protecting whatever extra responsibilities the MTO3**/MTO3***s are performing. I would really like to know what these duties or responsibilities are. An increase in up to £3,000 pontential earnings for MTO3s with enhancements, after AfC increase, must represent a big difference in person spec compared to that of the MTO3 who gets a £1000 cut after AfC - what gets taken off the job spec? Can anyone see what I'm getting at here?

In the 'real world' where a significant proportion are at the top of MTO3 R&R would have to apply in this case (MTO3 == Band5). In this scenario they would probably be the biggest losers since if they were placed at the top of AfC band 5 then they would lose up to £1000 at the regrading based on the latest AfC pay scales I've looked at and have 'nowhere' to progress to; plus the differential between MTO3**/MTO3** and MTO3 in terms of potential salary for the responsibilities, based on Pauls posting, would double.

What's more worrying if Roys comments are correct:

This will mean those in Band6 could actually fulfill their potential - leaving the individual on Band5 way back down the pay spine given time.

The MTO3 has, relatively speaking, nowhere to go if placed at the top of band 5 - unlike the MTO3s with pay-enhancements on band 6. Out of the whole bunch I reckon MTO3s at the top of their grade face the biggest risk of losing out based on what I see in Paul's posting.