- Conference
- 2006 Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 22 December 2005
- Decision
- Carried
The Prescription Pricing Authority (PPA) announced the creation of the Capacity Improvement Programme (CIP) in December 2003. Management stated that the aim for CIP was to increase the PPA’s prescription processing capacity deal with the rising intake without the need to open more processing divisions.
At this time it was stated that rollout would be lengthy as it involves a complete change to the IT infrastructure. For planning purposes it was assumed that the rollout may begin in April 2005 and could be complete by March 2008.
In a reply to a question from a member of staff on possible reduced staff numbers and redundancies after the first briefing in December 2003, management stated that “The whole idea behind CIP is to enable the PPA to meet increasing processing demands without having to recruit more and more staff, or resorting to the need to open an increased number of divisions….In short, I can honestly say that the CIP programme is not being designed with the intention of reducing staffing levels, but rather with the intention of enabling us to meet the increased demands that are going to be placed on us over the next few years…Complete roll out is not even forecast until 2008” and, in another reply, “complete roll out of the process is not forecast until 2008.”
In July 2004 it was again stated that “subsequent national rollout is still likely to be phased over a 3-year period, due to the extent of the change to our existing IT infrastructure.” At meeings on 19 and 27 October 2005, staff side representatives were informed that roll out will not be phased in over a 3 year period up until March 2008, but only one year, between April 2006 and March 2007. And, more importantly, it has been designed not just to remove the need to take on staff and open new divisions, but to significantly redue staff numbers by between 500 and 1000 whole time equivalents and to reduce the number of offices from 9 to 3.
Conference calls upon the Regional and National Health Care Group Executives to support a vigorous campaign led by the branch to:
i. challenge the company and to mitigate the worst excesses of their plans;
ii. to extend the roll out of CIP to ensure that it is effective, will deliver quality in the service we provide and enable staff to prepare their future career plans;
iii. to ensure any member of staff leaving the PPA during the roll out of CIP does so on terms acceptable to them;
iv. to support every single one of our members in the PPA and to ensure that any job losses will be on a voluntary basis first for our members.
The campaign to include full disclosure of information relating to the business
case for CIP to ensure that it is both cost effective and will deliver quality in the service we provide; the issuing of letters to all branches requesting support; and, if necessary, support for ballots for Industrial Action.