On Call Payments

Kansas

Jillanddy said:

Kansas said:

I am part of an on-call rota in an IT Department in the NHS.  There are 5 of us who do a week on call at a time, but 3 of us are band 4, one is band 5 and one is a band 6.

The payment system is that you get a percentage of your salary for actually being on call and then you get a full hour pay for being called (even if it takes you 2 minutes to sort)

If I receive a call to say, reset someone's password then I get paid around £12 but my colleague on a band 6 might get £18.....this doesn't strike me as fair as surely we should be getting paid the same if we are doing the same job of 'on-call' 

What do people think?
Cheers

What I think is that what people think is entirely irrelevant. The NHS won't care what we think. 


That said...

1. NHS terms are nationally negotiated. They won't be renegotiating them because you don't like them. 
2. There's a lot in life that's not fair. 
3. You have a sweet deal that few people in other employments have.  Be careful about questioning the gift horse. It might bite you. When employers, especially publicly funded cash strapped ones start looking at terms,  they rarely get better. 

Ok...I've worked for the NHS for nearly 30 years, I'm not one for complaining, there are plenty of people who moan and complain constantly about all sorts that you wouldn't believe....just for once, I'd like to see a level playing field...where someone is doing the exact same job of work as someone else they should, in my opinion, be paid the same amount of money for it. 

Having said that I don't expect anything would change even if we did complain, to be honest.

lisyloo

Where I have worked before the on-call was fixed amounts, but overtime e.g. 1.5 on a Saturday, was relative to salary.

sammyjammy

Kansas said:

I am part of an on-call rota in an IT Department in the NHS.  There are 5 of us who do a week on call at a time, but 3 of us are band 4, one is band 5 and one is a band 6.

The payment system is that you get a percentage of your salary for actually being on call and then you get a full hour pay for being called (even if it takes you 2 minutes to sort)

If I receive a call to say, reset someone's password then I get paid around £12 but my colleague on a band 6 might get £18.....this doesn't strike me as fair as surely we should be getting paid the same if we are doing the same job of 'on-call' 

What do people think?
Cheers

I think it depends if your inclusion on this rota is mandatory or not.  Where i work we occasionally have overtime to undertake a piece of work that is very time dependant if there are backlogs, as an example the work is Grade 2 level but anyone up to Grade 5 can volunteer to help out, they all get paid their Grade rate.  I've never had an issue with it.

If it was a mandatory situation I would be very unhappy.