Branch Secretary's Blog

Jeff Gorman

February 2024

On the 27th January 2024, a group of our members travelled to Cheltenham to join the 'Protect the right to Strike" demonstration. We joined thousands of other Trade Union members as we marched through the town centre. Thankfully, the weather held out for us and we had a great time. The protest was against the legislation that requires striking union members to provide a Minimum Service Level, something that we always do anyway, and this directly affects us in the ambulance service.

Please don't forget that it is our Annual General Meeting on the 21st March at 1.30pm. The meeting is online and full details can be found by clicking on our AGM link at the top of this page. The meeting is only open to NWAS UNISON members, if you wish to join us, email us using the link provided and we will send you an invite.

We have started to upload information onto the NWAS Digital wallboards. On there you can access the contact details of all of your local reps and snippets of news. As the system itself is quite basic, we are limited in what content we can upload so please keep coming back here for the latest updates.

There is a fair bit happening at the moment and we are busy looking after our members affected by the Leadership Review. This includes asking our management to do the right thing and include our SPTL's in the compensatory payments when working alongside a colleague on an ambulance. I have formally written to the Trust and at the time of writing this blog I still await a reply.

We have had incidents where some managers are refusing to sign off legitimate mileage claims because the staff member does not have business mileage insurance. This business Insurance is only required when travelling to multiple sites in any given day so if you are asked to travel to another place to work and you go straight there from home, you are entitled to claim the excess mileage. If you are having problems like this, please make sure that you contact us.

That's all for now, please feel free to contact me at anytime if you want to chat.