This year the national job evaluation group are reviewing and refreshing the national nursing and midwifery profiles used in evaluating your NHS roles.
We surveyed our nursing family last year to gain a full understanding of your role and how it has changed over time; so that we can ensure the new profiles accurately represent the range and breadth of NHS nurses’ work.
Many thousands of you answered; you told us that for the vast majority of you:
- Clinical practice is regularly dramatically affected by poor staffing levels
- Nursing and midwifery work is becoming more complex. The COVID pandemic accelerated many changes to the ways you practice; for example in acting more autonomously; undertaking more complex care and interventions; and holding greater responsibility for supervising students and other staff
- The majority of you don’t have your job description updated regularly. Most of you feel that your job description doesn’t accurately reflect your day to day practice; often significantly under-representing the complexity of your work.
We will be following up the survey with further interviews with nurses and midwives in key areas to understand in more depth how your job roles have changed. We will work with employers and other unions nationally to have the job profiles updated and renewed to better reflect the work of nurses and midwives in the NHS.
We will also soon be launching a new campaign for nurses, through which UNISON branches will be organising and engaging with nursing teams to survey your work, update job descriptions and win re-bandings.
What actions can I take?
If you believe you are banded incorrectly you can take the following steps:
- Talk to other colleagues doing the same job and ask your line manager for your job description to be updated. Consider requesting the role be re-evaluated by your local Job Evaluation panel if the job description is significantly changed.
- Get in touch with your UNISON branch; a UNISON rep can support you if you aren’t confident in requesting a re-banding. Consider volunteering for local job evaluation panels.
- Sign colleagues in your team up to UNISON. We achieve more when we work together. Look out for our new nursing campaign on this subject and encourage your branch to take part.
