Bristol hospitals face a “real risk” that staff will go on strike this summer and into autumn over pay, says the new man in charge of the BRI. Unions including the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) – the profession’s biggest union – and Unite are balloting hundreds of thousands of NHS workers nationally, urging members to vote for industrial action to protest a “miserable” salary offer.
Eugine Yafele, chief executive of University Hospitals Bristol & Weston NHS Trust (UHBW), which runs the Bristol Royal Infirmary, the Children’s Hospital and Weston General, told a meeting of its board that the Government had accepted the recommendations of the NHS pay review bodies but the increases were not fully funded. He said: “We have between a three to five per cent pay award proposed for non-medical staff and up to nine per cent for medics.
“As yet we’re waiting for the advisory notices in terms of how we implement the pay award. As ever the greatest risk at the moment is if trade unions reject the pay offer and the real risk around industrial action over the summer and into the autumn.
