DISCLAIMER: I am not an economist, and while I talk about union matters I’m not a member of any union.  Everything that I post here is true to the best of my knowledge at this moment.

When the unions asked the ambulance crews if we wanted to sign up to AfC “Agenda for Change”, we didn’t know the terms and conditions, nor what we would be paid.  The unions (at least Unison) suggested that we sign up to the new deal sight unseen.

The official deadline for the implementation of AfC was October 2004 – but it has taken so long for our pay to be worked out, we have only just started receiving it.

Our basic pay has gone down.

In the old scheme I was paid approx £22,500, with a bonus of £2,000 due to the high cost of living in London.  I wasn’t paid more for working nights or weekends.

Now, under AfC, I am paid £19,248 as basic pay.  I have money added for living in London.  The difference is that you receive a bonus on your pay depending on how many “unsocial hours” (nights and weekends) you work.  Due to the shift pattern I am on, my bonus is 25%.  Some people who don’t work nightshifts will have 0% bonus.

I take home more pay than I did under the old scheme (although in the long run I think I am going to be worse off because of the way the AfC ‘bandings’ work)

This month we have had our pay adjusted as we should have been paid this new rate from the deadline of October 2004.

However our ‘basic pay’ has been overpaid due to the difference between what we were paid (£22,500), and what we ‘should’ have been paid (£19248)

So that has been deducted from this months paypacket (around £3020 removed from each of us, some people for arcane reasons too complicated to go into have been deducted around £2,200).  Also deducted has been the £1,000 we were ‘advance paid’ last year.

Due to our ‘bonus’ for working unsocial hours which we haven’t been paid – I have an extra £5,137 in this months paypacket – which for me, personally makes this a good month.

My additions equal £5,137

My deductions = £4,020

My bonus for this AfC is therefore £1,117 which is added to my normal pay.  I come out on top (just).

But…

If you don’t work any unsocial hours – then you would miss out on that extra £5,137 in your packet, yet will have been deducted the £3,020 because of the reduction in our basic pay.  So I’ve heard of people taking home in total less than £800 this month.  (I’ve heard rumours of someone’s paypacket being £68.)

Also we have paid tax on the £3,020 we were ‘overpaid’ – will we be getting a tax rebate?

While our pay is ‘protected’ from being lower than it was before AfC, this doesn’t seem to count for deductions due to overpayment – although some people more legally minded than me are saying that such a ‘clawback‘ of money is against the terms and conditions of AfC.  Additionally it is believed that any reclaiming of ‘overpayment’ should be discussed with the staff four months in advance, and not sprung on us when we opened this months paypacket – it should also have been arranged so that any repayment doesn’t cause ‘undue financial hardship’.

The general thought is that the LAS accounting/management team has made a huge screw-up both legally and morally, and we are hoping that there will be a big U-turn over this pay coming soon.  Some staff are seeking advice from employment lawyers, which will make the next few days ‘interesting’ so say the least.

Morale at the moment is about as low as it can go – and this will doubtless affect our ORCON times, as who wants to come in and work overtime when you feel as if the LAS has shafted you.

The unions are remaining silent at the moment, and current belief is that they have sold us road staff down the river.

Personally, I’m fuming over decisions that have scuppered so many people on the road.

Comments are, as always, welcome especially if you think I have worked things out incorrectly – but trust me, everyone in the LAS affected by this has been working things out to be the same.

 

See – I told you I could do this without swearing.  Although there is a lot of swearing in messrooms across the capital at the moment.  I’ll update you when I know more.  Also – if my basic pay has gone down, this will affect any application I make in the future for a mortgage/loan – and I couldn’t afford a mortgage on my old pay…

Euan, who is a very nice man and much, much smarter than I sums up what is good about this interwub thing.

He just nails it.

 

 

Still taking out the sweary bits from my post about my pay…

The plan was perfect - we'd just taken a drunk to hospital and the patient (a 45 year old man, married, father of two) had decided to urinate in the back of our ambulance. Both my crewmate and I were happy at this, as we would have to return to our station to 'mop out', and on the way my crewmate could grab a chicken takeaway meal.

And I could get a cup of tea.

This apparently flawless plan was spoilt when we stopped for the food and a man came running out of a pub to tell me that a friend had "a f**k'in' big gash in his head", where he had fell over.

So I dutifully entered the pub, to find a fifty year old man with a cut down to the skull running from his hairline to his eyebrow. Most impressive.

Less impressive was his friend telling me that the patient had taken some 'speed' earlier.

I don't know about you, but I consider myself too old to be taking that stuff, let alone someone old enough to be my father.

Not that I've even taken speed myself. I like my braincells exactly how they are thankyewverymuch

Luckily another ambulance turned up and took the patient off our hands, and so we have returned to the station where I have just mopped out the back of the motor, and am typing this while waiting for it to dry out.

I just wish I could be a fly on the wall when our orignal drunken patient tries to explain to his wife exactly why he has pissed his trousers.


I'm preparing a post on our new pay - but it's taking a while for me to take all the swearing out of it...

There is a slight problem I have with returning to the ambulances, and that is my new partner is currently on sick leave, and has been for some time.  No-one knows when they are going to come back to work – so I’m often finding myself ‘single’ with nobody to work with.

When you are ‘single’ you can be teamed up with another ‘single’ pretty much anywhere in London.

At the moment our sector is having trouble reaching our government targets (which are calculated at the end of February), of particular concern is Poplar ambulance station who, because of atrocious manning, are struggling to meet the targets.  To counter this management have made it known that any shortfall in manning Poplar must be corrected as a priority.

So – when I’m single I’m often going to find myself making my way over to the Poplar area.

Last night however, there was no-one for me to work with at Poplar…So they asked me to work on the FRU.

Fear of being asked to travel over to the other side of London is I refused meant that last night I was once more a solo responder.

So last night I had the hump.

Thankfully it wasn’t too busy, the usual complaints of “my child hasn’t eaten properly for two days”, “I’m having an angina attack” and “I’m drunk” were quite enough.  There was one interesting job though – A policeman hit a pedestrian with his car.

Thankfully he wasn’t travelling on blue lights, nor going too fast for the road.  The woman apparently ran out into the road without looking, which given some of the pedestrian activities I normally see isn’t out of the ordinary.  Luckily for the woman involved there was an anesthetist walking past, and he managed the immediate need to keep her neck still.  After our examination our main concerns was that she was concussed and that she was cold from lying in the road – thankfully the ambulance was pretty quick, and she was soon in the warm, where our further examination showed no immediate injuries.

The area was cordened off and as the woman was being looked after by the crew I went to make sure that the policeman who was driving was alright.  He was quite shaken up by the event, and I hope he gets support from his work.

In completely unrelated news, there is a lot of anger amongst us EMTs in London – as a lot of people are getting docked pay under our Agenda for Change pay-deal.  As soon I find out more, I’ll let you know – but it looks like some people are losing as much as £3,200 this year.  As it’s to do with money I don’t understand it myself, but I’ll get someone to explain it to me.

An EMT killed their workmate when they ‘playfully’ shocked them with a defib.

“Joshua Philip Martin was in his fourth day on the job as a rescue-squad worker in Russell County when, in a playful mood, he decided to reach into the front seat of the ambulance and zap one of his co-workers with the defibrillator paddles. The rookie's mistake was fatal.”

A horrific story, and really beyond comment.

Via Warren Ellis.

Seven hour shifts are really easy to do, especially when you have spent the last year doing only twelve hour shifts.

The jobs tonight were pretty easy – even easier for me as I was driving the ambulance rather than treating the patients.  We had a sixteen year old girl with a sore throat, a pair of drunks, one of which had a twisted ankle, a little old lady who’d fell over indoors and had a nasty scrape to her arm, and a young woman, twelve weeks pregnant, who had been assaulted at work and struck in the stomach.

The real stand out job for me shows just how daft some people are.

The patient was a twelve year old boy.  We got the job as ‘child banging head on walls and floor’ and when we turned up the child was indeed clutching his head and hitting it against a wall.  The parents and child spoke poor English, but we easily managed to learn that the child was suffering from an earache, and that this was the cause of the head-hitting.

“How long has he had the pain?” asked my crewmate for the night.

“Five years then, three hours now,” replied the father.

We understood what he meant – the child had an earache five years ago, but this current episode, and the reason why we were called out, had lasted three hours.

“Have you given him any painkillers?”

“No,” the father looked confused.

“Do you have any painkillers?” my crewmate asked.

“Yes, but we haven’t given him any,” said the father.

So the family could see their child rolling around the floor, screaming in pain and banging his head against the walls, and didn’t consider that a painkiller might have…oh I don’t know…helped with the pain.

I can imagine the scene in the hospital when the nurses give the child some pain relief – the parents looking at each other, slapping their foreheads and saying “Doh!  We could have done that!”.

There are a lot of daft people out there – and I get to meet most of them.

Grand Rounds are up at Kevin, M.D. the weekly roundup of the best medical blog posts.

The problem with having two quiet days at work is that there isn’t that much to write about.

On Saturday one of the first jobs was to someone whose name my crewmate recognised.

“He’s a nice old boy,” he told me.  “When his wife was alive she’d call us every time he coughed.  He’s deaf and blind – used to be a British champion boxer.  He’s a big fella, so I hope we don’t have to carry him downstairs.  We don’t see him much now, he hasn’t called us out in ages”.

The patient was sitting alone in his flat, scattered around him were books that he could no longer read.  In the corner was a television that probably hadn’t been turned on in years.  Just a frail man sitting quietly in his chair marking time.  On the table next to his chair was the remains of some ‘meals on wheels’.  I could see that he had once been a ‘solid’ man, like the men who worked on the docks – tall and thick with muscle.  He wasn’t that man anymore.  He was frail, shaking, and seemed nervous of everything, not something that you’d expect from an ex-boxer.

It was hard getting his history, as I needed to lean close to his ear and shout.  At one point he let out a hacking cough just as I was leaning next to him – so we took him to hospital with a possible chest infection.

Our last job of the day was back to the same address – he’d been discharged from hospital and just wanted someone to ‘check his pulse’. 

We didn’t mind.