How many people get their home telephone line rental paid when they are on-call? This morning all staff who have previously had this paid have received letters telling them this will no longer be paid. The letter claims this has been agreed with the Unions following full consultation. (Our Union rep has not even heard a rumour about this!) It seems and there is no entitlement under AfC terms and conditions. This organisation certainly knows how to loose goodwill.
Graham

I thought it was more normal now for hospitals to issue mobile phones for on-call techs.

Hi Graham,
We too have fallen victim to the withdrawl of telephone rental reimbursement for on-call staff.
However i must confess that i was party to this move in my Directorate BEFORE the trust wide notification.(similar to what you quote).

The reason behind this was to try to reduce costs within the department and across the organisation as a whole. It may sound mean and a bit small mined given the costs involved but we have 8 staff on-call and the option of the a number of mobiles to go round was better, even given the perceived restrictions.
So you are not alone !

Steve

Hi Guys,

Our hospital took a very reasonable response on this some years ago. Based upon European Law issues, the Trust stated that they interpret issues around 'Infringing on your human rights'to include calling you at home.
They therefore took the stance, 'If we pay your telephone rental and vat on it - can we call you at home?

Yes please and so we allow them to infringe on our human rights i.e.,not to have our employer bother our private lives when out of work time.

Be on-call, but how will they call you, they will have to pay for, mobile phone or your home rental, etc. If they page you, they will have to pay for your return call, etc.

Be hard and be harsh, don't go soft.

Jimbo

When on call here we get handed a mobile phone.
I have enough with tele-sales phoning me at home, I wouldnt want work calling me!

We have a mixed bag. We have several areas where we provide an On-Call service, so have several technicians from these areas On-Call at any one time.

Some areas pressed for the provision of a mobile phone years ago when they were quite an expensive commodity, as they wanted the freedom to go out wherever and whenever they wished (within reason).

Other technicians stuck with being paid line rental.

Now, the technicians who have a mobile phone would prefer the line rental, but have been told that as they have accepted a mobile phone that they cannot go back to having line rental instead. The Trust is now applying pressure for the issue of mobile phones to the other On-Call areas.

The "duty" mobile phone is the answer here, obviously. Why would the techs prefer the line rental, BSM?

We still get our telephone rental paid although there have been some proposals in the past to do away with it, but so far these have fallen by the way side. We have always objected to mobile phones as there are a number of dead areas locally and on health grounds ( who wants yet another device irradiating your body!)

Geoff,

Some of our technicians prefer the line rental beacuse they believe that it is worth more than being given another mobile phone to carry around. Some (albeit a small percentage) have refused on health grounds similar to those mentioned by yraG.

... worth more to them, do you mean?

And I just refuse to believe that any biomed seriously objects to carrying an on-call mobile phone on "health grounds"! What about the myriad of risks to health encountered everyday just by being in the hospital, and working on the kit? What's more important, being available on-call, or some imagined risk? And don't we manage risks these days, anyway?

yraG of Margate's point about communications dead zones is valid, but we are, after all, technical people, and radio pagers (etc.) have been about for a long time. Dare I mention Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and all the rest? Such problems can be overcome (as long as the will to do so is there).

Am I being too harsh if I suggest that the real issue could be that some people don't want to provide an on-call service at all? Perhaps some people don't really want to be biomeds either (and yes, I have met a few).

Bottom line is, if you're taking the money, then you do the job. Yes, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way". Biomed is not your typical (ie, mundane) 9-to-5 job, never was and never will be (I hope). Here endeth the lesson.

Get real guys!

Geoff,

I, too, have met Techs who want the grade & salary, but moan about the fact that they are required to take part in an On-Call rota as a result. I agree that if you are willing to accept the terms of employment and take the On-Call payments, then you should accept that, occasionally, you are going to get called at home, and that you may have to attend work. In my experience, there are usually people who are quite willing to swap with you if your On-Call clashes with something else.

And to answer you question: Yes, they believe that line rental is worth more to them than being given an On-Call mobile phone, but ten years ago, a mobile phone was probably seen as more valuable than line rental. Now the tables have been turned, these Techs would now prefer the cash. Unfortunately (for them) how can you argue that you now want the line rental when the Trust has supplied you with an alternative that gives you more freedom (and is now probably cheaper).

Ultimatley, these Techs went for what was the better deal for them ten years ago, but the times have changed.

For my part, I have always been paid line rental, but if I was told that a shiny mobile phone was being provided instead, then OK - that's progress!?

Going back to Graham’s original post, to my mind it is almost beyond belief that this issue of payment for telephone line rental versus mobile phones etc. wasn’t threshed out during the AfC "negotiations". During that time I did two stints as an agency technician in well-known hospitals, and those guys attended seemingly endless meetings about every word (and comma) in the job specifications and descriptions being drafted (…meanwhile I got on with the work)! Goodwill? What goodwill? You take their money, you do the job, simple as that (... "my way, or the highway")!

In response to your last post, BSM, I meet many unhappy chappies in NHS biomed shops. My advice to them is always the same. If you’re not happy, get out (ie, life’s too short). Try the Dark Side for a while, and chances are in six months or so you’ll be running back to the NHS (the comfort zone?)!

No 'phone line rental in the Dark Side, by the way. You might get a company mobile phone, though, if you're valued enough.

I would prefer the use of a mobile rather than payment for a land line. With a mobile telephone I would be free to leave the house.
Thinking about it I wouldnt even recognise my house phone ringing cos ive never heard it before!!

PaulKWJ

Don't you have to carry a pager when you're on-call? If so, then you're still free to leave the house.

This is my point:

10+ years ago, mobile phones were (relatively) expensive, and hardly anyone had them. Therefore it was a bonus if you were supplied one when you were on-call (instead of line rental), because you then had access to a phone if you were paged no matter where you were.

Now, almost everyone has a mobile phone anyway, so it has lost a lot of its value, whereas being paid line rental has not - and even if you are paid line rental, you can still go out as you have your own mobile phone, should you get paged.

Hi,

The set up here is that a mobile telephone is provided to the on call staff member (although in real terms it's most often on divert to their own mobile!).

Over the past three years there have been two instances of the mobile phone network letting us down and as a result a pager is carried as a backup. Staff within the unit covered much prefer to be able to contact the on call engineer directly and know straight away how we are to respond and in what kind of time scale, thus the pager is generally a last resort.

Using a pager system in my experience means that when you call back you often end up speaking to someone other than the person who has the problem and get a different (and often highly inacurate) perspective on the problem.

As for line rental I for one wouldnt fine much use for that as I dont (and haven't for years) have a land line at home.

As stated before we get our telephone rental paid, we also have a pager which enables us to get about, and use our own mobiles to ring in, but our Trust is looking to get rid of on-call entirely, has already gone through 30 day consultation, the recommendation going to the clinical trust board for decision from our managers/directors is that it should be abolished, it will be nice to have more free time but the loss in earnings won't be so good and also its definitely a retrograde step as regards the service to the hospital and its patients.

Going slightly off track, but only just, I wonder just how many out of hours calls there are. From my experience, not very many. The reality, therefore, may be that there is no real need to maintain an on call service. Just a thought.

yraG
If you loose your on call check with your union, your payments may be protected for a period of time and it affects your pension arrangements as on call was included in final salary calculations!

Yes, our Trust supplies a pager AND pays the Home phone line rental.
There is a lot of discussion at the moment in the dept about the validity of even having an On-call. When you analyse the calls and who gets them, our med gas side gets one or two every blue moon. The electronics side are mainly called to change fluids on our blood gas analysers.(Which is really not an EBME function but a Bio-chem job)
The Trust makes a big noise about saving money but seem unwilling to see the obvious...

I missed this post the first time around. I think that Garham's initial point was that over the year the value of the line rental mounted up. We have had our line rental payments altered mainly because on call staff were on different suppliers and tarriffs i.e. cable. To simplify matters our trust set a level of repayment of £12 a month based on BT's basic tarriff (+vat). I think we would be a bit miffed to lose out on £144 a year. As for removing on call altogether that is pure madness. What would happen in an emergency? Will the trust in question stump up the cash for extra (spare) equipment?

motorola f3 mobile phone costs £15 or so.

Mobile seems a better option for on-call techs

I get phone rental paid as unfortunately I have very poor mobile reception at my home.

We're just greedy and have both the line rental paid and a mobile phone each. The government tarrif if £5 per month so it costs my budget 360 a year. A quid a day and no complaints from the management...must be a first