Following motions on which your branch representatives spoke at Health Conference last month, UNISON is conducting a survey of all ambulance members to understand our views on important issues such as early retirement, unsocial hours provisions and health and wellbeing under the pressures we experience day in, day out carrying out our roles.
As a branch we are urging all members to complete the survey by the deadline of noon on Wednesday 5th July.
Click here to complete survey
The results will be used by the UNISON ambulance occupational group to help them build and develop the national ambulance workplan, identify key issues to take forward via the National Ambulance Social Partnership Forum (England), as well as to help shape future UK wide ambulance campaigns.
The survey has not ‘come out of nowhere’, but is the result of the democratic process in which your SECAmb UNISON representatives have been involved. It is one of the steps that we were calling for through speaking in support of two particular motions at Health Conference last month.
Please make sure you take up this opportunity to help us make sure your voice is heard!
As you will see below, there is a direct line between what branch members have been telling us is important to them, how we have joined others within the sector in seeking and gaining support for the actions that are needed to take action on these issues, and the survey which has been distributed to establish the evidence needed to guide us forward.
Motion 19: Ambulance pressures and the impact on staff
“Ambulance waiting times outside of hospitals are now the longest they have ever been in recorded history… Conference applauds the work of UNISON members in Ambulance services who have been performing under incredible pressures due to the pandemic, underfunding of the NHS and lack of social care packages for patients…This has taken an enormous toll on the health and wellbeing of ambulance staff and has seen record numbers of ambulance staff leave the service. UNISON as the union for Ambulance staff needs to highlight the impact the pressures are having on NHS Ambulance staff.”
One of the calls to action in this motion was to “Conduct a survey of ambulance members to identify key issues and produce meaningful data to support a UNISON report on the impact of pressures on ambulance staff. Use this data to produce materials for individual ambulance branches to raise with their employers for improvements”
Motion 35. Retirement age parity with Emergency Services for Ambulance Staff
“Lowering the retirement age for ambulance staff in line with other emergency services workers continues to be a high priority for UNISON members working in the ambulance sector. …in 2018… the then health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock, [was presented] with a petition signed by over 250,000 [ambulance service] people calling for their retirement age to be reduced from 67 to 60. Unfortunately, such calls were unheeded and since then growing pressures have left our ambulance services on their knees.”
“Handover delays, exacerbated by a growing social care crisis, have led to ambulance staff witnessing patients dying in the back of their vehicles, while being unable to tend to other seriously ill patients…the mental health impact this is having on staff – combined with low pay and worsening working conditions – is causing ambulance workers to leave the NHS in their droves… These workers [should not] have to endure the effects of working in such a high-pressured environment well into their 60s.”
One of the calls to action in this motion was to “commission research to identify the physical and mental impact on specific staff groups working in the ambulance service, particularly during the later years of their working life”. Another was to “promote and seek improvements to the existing Early Retirement Reduction Buy Out scheme negotiated by UNISON to share costs 50:50 between employers and staff”.