Ambulance Services: Staff

(asked on 5th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce barriers to career progression for ambulance service staff within NHS England.


Answered by
Helen Whately Portrait
Helen Whately
Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 10th March 2020

The National Health Service trade unions agreed as part of the three-year deal that new ambulance staff would be paid unsocial hours in the same way as everyone else under the Agenda for Change contract. This is so ambulance staff have the same arrangements as, for example, nurses and midwives.

We do not anticipate an impact on retention. Existing ambulance staff were given the choice to remain on their historic unsocial hours arrangements if they did not want to move to the new arrangements in place for all other staff. The latest data available does not show any reduction in unsocial hours pay for ambulance staff.

Under Section 2 of the NHS Terms and Conditions of Service, a percentage enhancement is paid on top of hours worked in unsocial hours periods, such as nights and weekends. These are the arrangements that apply to new ambulance staff and those that choose to switch to them, and mean the more unsocial hours that are worked, the higher the pay.

In 2016 a new job profile for paramedics was agreed with ambulance trade unions, allowing them to develop in to a higher pay band. Newly qualified paramedics can progress in to the higher band after two years if they meet the learning outcomes. Paramedics can be ‘fast-tracked’ if they can meet all the competencies in less than two years.

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