The Department of Health has given the strongest steer yet on how it would like to see clinical excellence awards changed.
In its submission to the Pay Review Body, which is conducting a review into CEAs on behalf of the government, the DoH proposes a ‘slimmer’ system of national awards with trusts being given control of local awards from 2012.
The DoH says: ‘Trusts will be able to choose whether to have a local scheme, the criteria for making awards and how much to spend on their scheme. This approach responds to the wishes of employers to have greater freedoms to design processes that reflect local priorities and considerations.’
This follows a submission by NHS Employers to the Pay Review Body saying that awards should not be pensionable, protection should end and any available money - as a result of the reform - should be redistributed directly to employers, to use as part of their pay and reward system.
On a more supportive note, the DoH says it ‘accepts the need for some compensation levels and incentives above basic pay scales’ for NHS consultants ‘who provide outstanding patient care and make major achievements in their NHS work’.
The DoH invites the Pay Review Body to recommend new arrangements based on the principles of rewarding excellence within available NHS resources; facilitating regular assessment of achievement; making non-consolidated payments; adopting a consistent approach on pensionability with the public sector following the final Hutton report; and, making greater use of non-financial recognition.
The submission also says that national awards would no longer be given in recognition of work done for the royal colleges. Instead, the DoH would pay the colleges an annual amount with which they could reimburse trusts whose consultants work with them.
The DoH also highlights a number of ‘anomalous features’ which it urges the review to address. These include a requirement for existing award holders to reapply for an award on an annual basis rather than having them reviewed; and, improving clarity by removing the overlap between Level 9 of the local awards and Bronze of the national awards.
The Pay Review Body is due to report in summer 2011.
Stephen Campion, chief executive of the HCSA, acknowledged that there were problems with the CEA system, but added: “There is much that has to, and indeed can only, be done by consultants at the national level to serve the wider interests of the NHS. I am all for employers having the freedom to have local processes to recognise local achievement, but not at the expense of diluting or discouraging the necessary contribution made by consultants at the national level as well.”
The government has already sought to reduce the number CEAs handed out to doctors in the 2011 round in England prior to the DDRB’s review findings.
In the draft guides for the 2011 round of CEAs from the Advisory Committee on Clinical Excellence Awards, the government agency that administers them, the ratio used to calculate the minimum level of investment for employer based awards has been reduced from 0.35 to 0.2 per eligible consultant.
CEAs have effectively been scrapped in Northern Ireland, pending the review, and distinction awards stopped in Scotland.
Consultants are currently experiencing a two-year pay freeze, and the government is being lobbied over a corresponding freeze in pay increments.
Read all the submission’s to the Pay Body’s review.
Tags: CEAs
When you are discussing hospital consultant salaries in the UK (junior docs - remember this is what you will get in the future), it may be worth comparing the current situation with what is happening elsewhere, such as in Ireland.
If you look at http://saraburke.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/consultants-dissatisfied-with-cut-backs/, you will find out what consultants are paid in Ireland.
To quote from the above: “…. consultants working public only starting salary is €166,000 but can earn up to €208,000 if they become a professor with a public only consultant. Those on Type B contracts, which allows public and private work, start at €156,000 but can earn more, if they take on additional roles.”
What about CEAs you might say? Well, even if you are one of the tiny number of UK consultants who manage to claw there way up to being awarded a platinum CE award (and, remember, only a handful of these are available annually - and anyway CEAs may even be withdrawn this year in the same way as they have already been in Scotland), you can get up to £175,000, but only for the last few years of your career. Remember also that this is the sort of salary that all Irish consultants are receiving from the outset of their taking up a consultant post and, unlike in the UK, not just a few who have managed to get to the top of a very greasy pole.
Don’t kid yourself that we are well paid in the UK compared to equivalent countries. Take a look at what doctors are paid in Australia and the USA as well.
If you add to that that the NHS enjoys pretty well a 100% monopoly of our labour, as the UK’s private sector is so tiny (at least outside of London) that you really have nowhere else that you can work, when it comes to negotiating our own pay and conditions we British doctors have managed to put ourselves into a pretty dreadful situation with no aces to play. Where did all those brains that acquired all those A grades at A level to get into medical school disappear to???? Don’t blame governments completely - we are a useless shower when it comes to presenting a collective face and standing up for ourselves.
There are some compensations however. At least you can take some comfort out of the fact that your pay freeze is helping those nice bankers and captains of industry to earn their justly-deserved millions!!!! In addition, isn’t it fun to live up to all those lavish promises that Labour made on your behalf about how hard you would work.