HP UMail - November
DHPEB2: you made them listen
Congratulations to all those who supported your delegates and held Queensland Health to account. Queensland Health as a result has placed out the information on the HPEB2 wage increases and back payments. They have announced payment of new wage rates and your applicable back payment will occur on 14 December 2011.
You can access the pay schedules by using the following link and going to these pay schedules at the end of the document http://www.health.qld.gov.au/eb/agreements/hpeb2/proposed-hpeb2.pdf.
Stay tuned for Celebration activities across the state.
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DCHO Challenges
Together members in the Division of the Chief Health Officer, Queensland Health are facing major challenges, with foreshadowed changes brought on by the VSP process as well as the concurrent National Health Reforms.
However, vigilance by delegates and members working together has ensured that management can’t use this time of change to avoid their responsibilities to use the agreed change management processes.
An example has been a recent decision by senior management to inform a specific unit that their function would be devolved to the new Local Health and Hospital Networks and that their unit would be “downsized”. This was all done without any consultation with staff or the Union and resulted in significant emotional and professional distress amongst the staff.
Fortunately one of the local union delegates was notified immediately and was invited by the manager of the unit to address a staff meeting where a commitment was made to pursue the issue and insist on proper processes being used such as production of Business Cases and formal consultation. A number of new members signed up on the spot!
At the next meeting of the Divisional Consultative Forum, the issue was raised with some vigour and after negotiation, management agreed to post a public retraction to the staff concerned and promised to use the agreed processes in future. Eventually (after some persistent prompting) this retraction was sent and management are now very much on notice that we are watching their actions and we will be making sure that as the VSP drama plays out and as the new structure of Queensland Health Corporate Office is made clearer
Events like this are a good illustration that while Together members remain alert and active, we have a much better chance of achieving better outcomes for our staff and subsequently better outcomes for the taxpayers of Queensland.
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Individual pledges = Collective action = Management Acting
A huge congratulations to all Oral Health members who signed individual pledges surrounding an unworkable standard that Queensland Health wanted to implement.
The standard was supposed to quantifies the working relationship between DT/OHTs and dentists, despite Delegates informing Queensland Health that the proposed standard was unworkable this continued to be ignored.
As a result Delegates and Members held meeting across the state and collected individual pledges to only undertake clinical work when there is on-site supervision by a dentist, until the issue of supervision as stated in Queensland Health’s standard was resolved.
Delegates were not going to attend a meeting with Management unless they could collect pledges from well over 75% of therapist members or, they felt there would not have been enough support to pursue the matter, however this was not a problem so Together Delegates attended a meeting on 3rd November with the Director General of Health. The DG agreed to the delegates suggestion to not implement the standard and to form a joint submission to be forwarded to the Dental Board of Australia and more importantly AHMAC (Australia Health Ministers Advisory Council) to not only fix this situation on a state wide basis but nationally.
This is a huge win for Oral Health members, without this action by members this meeting would not have been successful, it showed management that members were serious about this issue and willing to take a stand.
