- Conference
- 2024 National Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 7 December 2023
- Decision
- Carried
The Newly Qualified Paramedic (NQP) programme formed part of a UNISON led negotiated agreement to move all paramedics to band 6 in 2016.
The programme was designed to provide structure to properly integrate and support NQPs into the ambulance service workplace, enabling time to consistently apply academic knowledge, skills, and placement experience into confident practice over a period of 24 months.
The programme itself asserts it is there to support the NQP in their transition to an effective, confident and fully autonomous clinician, providing the foundations for a journey of lifelong learning with commitments around preceptorship and mentorship. UNISON entered into this preceptorship programme in good faith, calling on employers to invest in and support new staff.
However, NQPs are being short changed, and employers haven’t kept to their end of the bargain. Our paramedic members feel like they work as fully qualified paramedics from the get-go, often with very little support, and that the programme only exists to keep them paid at band 5 for the duration of the 24 month period.
UNISON believes it’s time for employers to deliver the NQP programme as it was intended and accept that paramedics should be paid band 6 from point of registration with the HCPC.
We call on the SGE to work with the national ambulance occupational group to:
1. Support branches to build our membership and activists base within the NQP workforce
2. Facilitate branch engagement with current and former NQPs, to gather evidence of their experience of being an NQP, and their interaction with the NQP programme.
3. Support branches to build campaigns highlighting failures in how the programme is being delivered locally by ambulance employers
4. Use the National Ambulance Strategic Partnership Forum to call for a review of the NQP programme, including the fast-track scheme, and to call for NQPs to be paid at band 6 at the point of registration with HCPC.