Nursing Rosters Sample Clauses

Nursing Rosters. Within the context of the Haddington Road Agreement, nursing staff as a professional group within the Mental Health Division have been highlighted as potentially being the largest group of staff from which additional HRA hours can be ‘harvested’ as cash releasing. As a sub group of the nurses, those nursing staff who are working a rostered work pattern, usually based in an Approved Centre, should provide the highest yield of cash releasing hours. The standard contracted hours for a nurse now stands at 39 hours per week following the implementation of the HRA on the 1st July 2013. Prior to the HRA, nurses worked a 37.5 hour week which had been introduced around 2008. Prior to this nursing staff worked a 39 hour week. Following the introduction of the shorter working week for nurses in 2008, many of the areas where nursing staff were based didn’t adjust the nursing roster to account for this change. Nursing rosters had been developed to accommodate the 39 hour week. Non rostered nursing staff such a community nurses weren’t greatly affected by the reduction in hours in that they mostly worked Monday to Friday, 9-5. The reduction in hours simply meant that they adjusted their starting or finishing times to work to comply with the 37.5 hours per week. With rostered staff, the majority of these were based in Approved Centres. They continued to work the old roster system which had been designed for the 39 hour week and accrued additional time owed (Time Off in Lieu) each week of 1.5 hours. In certain cases, the addition TOIL was paid as structured overtime while in others, staff ‘banked’ the additional time each week to be taken as time off at a later stage. The management of TOIL varied across the country with some services capping the level of TOIL that could be accumulated while others have allowed TOIL to build up over many years. In the past, those staff that took TOIL may have been replaced on overtime by other staff to maintain staffing numbers or in the minority of cases, staff were given TOIL with no replacement costs (i.e., within the existing compliment). What has become evident in some services who have large amounts of TOIL owed to their nurses, is that the additional HRA hours are now been used to cover other staff taking their TOIL now. One could argue that this could be construed as cash releasing in that overtime isn’t being used currently to cover this activity. However, large amounts of TOIL which have accumulated over a number of years is a l...