EBME Forums Forums Management Professional Issues Agenda For Change Disclosing AFC results

Chris,
One of the "benefits" of a Foundation Trust is that it is independent of national pay structures. If it wants to concentrate on a speciality and needs to attract specific staff in, it can pay accordingly. Or not pay other staff as much if it wants as well.
So all this AfC trauma is a short-lived thing for some Trusts. I wonder how much the AfC process has cost in man hours and more importantly upset staff.
Currently we have the option to remain on a Trust contract or opt for AfC, which ever is of benefit to us.
When the Trust becomes a Foundation Trust you have to change to one of their contracts. They have then got you and your pay under their control.
Going back to annual pay up-lifts Foundation Trusts are then not bound by any national agreement on them as well. So are more people going to get less than inflation rises?
Back to my question, has anyone else had this different annual up-lift applied to them?
Robert

RoJo
When a Trust takes on Foundation Status, the management can survey staff to see if they wish to stay on Nationally agreed conditions of employment ie. AFC. However, if the majority answer is no, then locally agreed contracts can be implemented (as happened in Stafford I belive, where 90% of staff rejected AFC conditions). However, there is no obligation to do any of this as the duly appointed management board (appointed by the staff and local community) make the final decision on how the Trust is run with regard to staff pay and conditions.

Robert, have you actually completed the JD and person spec and been banded? I gather that you don't know what band you'd be on under AfC so I assume you either havent reached that stage or the trust is only just moving over to AfC.

If you haven't been banded it's really poor having to choose between 1.5% of something you know compared with 2.5% of something you don't!

From my understanding of AfC and foundation status I gathered also that it was a option of national AfC or local independant contracts. So in theory the people who could receive a lower annual up-lift would be those at Foundation trusts on local contracts if the trust decided to payless. Of course the trust could always have an annual rise greater than AfC but whats the likelyhood of that!

We have just received our bandings, with mixed success:

MTO2's - Band 4 (matched to Medical Engineering Technician Entry Level - Appealing! (or should that be appalling).
MTO3’s – Band 6 (matched to Specialist Medical Engineering Technician).
MTO4 – Band 7.

We are obviously very disappointed with the Band 4 given to the MTO2’s, and have started the appeal process. The technicians are of a high calibre with several years experience – so a match to entry level is definitely inappropriate.

I see a lot of people are requesting JD’s – but please remember that the post is graded using a JD and a person spec. The person spec should be the document, which contains details of knowledge and experience (qualifications) required. It seems we tripped over here with the MTO2’s. We had expected the posts to be matched against a Medical Engineering Technician, Band 5. The national profile for this post has Factor 2 (knowledge, training and experience) at level 5, suggesting HND/Beng. However, the AFC Job evaluation Handbook states level 5 “normally requires degree level…”.

We had specified HNC/HND on the person spec, to try and give us a chance of finding suitable candidates when we need to recruit. It seems the interpretation being applied by our matching panels in this Trust is no degree, no Band 5. Good luck to everybody awaiting results.

Cheers, Jeff.

Chris,
I have been banded and know what it would be but decided to turn it down as I would be worse off in the long term. I still have increments to go on my old NHS/Trust payscale but would have fewer increments under the AfC banding so this would put a lower cap on my salary.

I was told that all staff would be automatically transfered to Foundation Trust contract but am willing to be corrected on that if you know different. The reason I was told for the complete change was so that the Foundation Trust had complete control of its budget. If people remained on national AfC contracts and pay rates the Foundation Trust would not have control of part of its salary budget. The whole point of a Foundation Trust is that it can manage itself without external (government) interference.

Does anyone know for sure?

Robert

PS Have you seen the news about Ipswich Hospital which was finded for fast treatment?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/5237824.stm
The BBC website also has information on new Foundation Trusts that have just been approved. Has anyone from one of these heard about their contracts?

Jeff

I don't know if it has happened with your MTO2's but one problem that arises is that job descriptions and person specs are written with the bare minimum that would be required to advertise the post and not what is actually required to fully carry out the post. The question that's got to be asked is what is actually required to replace that individual the next day without having to provide training and further courses!

There's some clerical posts in the NHS that are only advertised requiring GCSE's but they've claimed that they are equivalent to degree. Mainly because the jobs are so boring that they couldn't get anybody to do those if they were advertised with AfC grades that only require GCSEs! Personally I think this is abusing the system a bit and this should be covered under recruitment and retention, then again it doesn't give someone much motivation when it's considered that your job isn't worth what you’re being paid!

Another problem I've seen is the amount of waffle in the job description and person specs. It seems that those who's job descriptions are short but sweet have a better chance of getting graded higher, whereas with long winded JD's and person specs in some instances have clearly caused the matching panels problems.

Chris

Thanks to Mark Newstead for sending the MTO2 Band5 JD >> which can be found here.

Hi Chris

Our JD's used to be simple, clear single sheet documents. They are now multipage lists covering every aspect of duties performed. It is hard work reading through one - I certainly wouldn't like to sit on a matching panel.

When I received my own grading, it contained a score sheet to show how my role had been matched to a national profile. This contained carefully worded phrases cut from my JD and PS, to justify the match. Most of the these, whilst being accurate, were only really included for the benefit of the matching panel, and I'm sure were completely necessary to enable a suitable match to be made. A local hospital who had made an excellant job of producing JD's had been good enough to share them with us. They obviously needed a great deal of alteration to suit our own roles, but provided an excellant starting point.

Cheers, Jeff.

Mines the same multipaged documents and it's clear that stuff has been over looked. On freedom to act the wording used was the same as the AfC handbook but has been marked lower. Of the ones I've seen so far that have come out on band 5 they don't go into detail so much and it's very easy just to pull the key phases straight out of them.

Regarding a comment about Beng/HND - according to my boss, he is not interested in the actual qualification, but the standard or level of certain subjects.
In his opinion, he feels the electrical/ electronic subject of a HND is the equivalent to that of a degree and this is why our profile has HND/degree.