- Conference
- 2024 National Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 6 December 2023
- Decision
- Carried
Reducing the working week has long been a key goal of the trade union movement. The issue has re-emerged strongly over recent years as investment in technology is used to threaten jobs and damage patient services.
Conference acknowledges that the NHS is under extreme demand and pressure. This pressure lands almost completely on staff. Almost half of all NHS staff report they feel worn out at the end of their working day/shift, and 45% of NHS staff felt unwell as a result of work-related stress over the last 12 months. That figure is particularly high among groups of staff disproportionately likely to work shifts, with 64% of paramedics and 63% of midwives reporting work-related stress.
NHS staff cannot continue to work the combination of length and intensity of hours they currently do. Fatigue, stress and burnout are dangerous in any workplace, particularly patient-facing services. All this has consequences. More than 15 million working days were lost to stress last year. And many staff are voting with their feet, leaving the NHS for work elsewhere.
Conference understands that it is not enough to simply look at “four-day week” or office-based pilots and solutions. We need to generate NHS-owned solutions that can genuinely deliver a reduction in the burden on patient facing staff, whilst honestly assessing what is needed to maintain and improve those patient services. As the biggest union in the NHS, UNISON has a particular responsibility to be bold and lead on this work.
With proper planning, worker-led design, and careful operation, a reduced working week would put capacity back into the NHS. But there are significant challenges, and we must face them.
Across the NHS we already manage incredibly complex shift patterns. It is not beyond us to develop a better way of working. A model of 80% of hours worked for 100% of pay would not mean a single approach to shifts in the NHS.
In order to develop and describe these models we need to explore these issues with workers themselves.
Conference calls on the Health Service Group Executive to:
1. Support branches to lead workplace conversations on how a reduced working week could be implemented, including producing workshop materials.
2. Assess any progress on the 80% hours for 100% pay agenda in round-the-clock environments for learning relevant to the healthcare sector.
3. Support UNISON Scotland and UNISON Cymru/Wales with work to progress and implement the phased working week reduction commitments agreed in their 2022-24 pay deals.
4. Take account of developments arising from hostile political intervention in local government ‘four-day-week’ initiatives and robustly reject any attempts to do so in health.