'Treat us more like doctors'

Nurses' conference: College demands preferential treatment as minister is heckled over pay

Angry nurses yesterday warned the health minister that they should not be treated like other health workers over pay.

John Bowis, under secretary of state for health, was heckled and barracked on the first day of the Royal College of Nursing annual congress in Bournemouth as he tried to explain the Government's move towards locally negotiated salaries.

And in her keynote speech Betty Kershaw, president of the college, made it clear that nurses wanted to be treated more like doctors who this year were awarded a nationwide increase.

Dr Kershaw reopened a wound with public service union Unison, attacking its agreement with health service management which provided for an element of pay bargaining at trust level. While Unison, which represents both nurses and ancillary staff, had struck a deal over locally negotiated pay, the RCN was opposed to it, Dr Kershaw told delegates.

"Nurses cannot be treated like other health care workers, because we aren't like other health care workers. This is the Royal College of Nursing. It isn't and never will be a Royal College of Health Workers."

To applause the college president emphasised that the RCN was a professional union. "The world's largest professional union."

She reminded the minister that the conference this week would be debating professional issues and the trend towards increasing medical responsibility for nurses. "You will be left in absolutely no doubt that nurses are a professional group and we should be treated as a professional group."

Responding to her assertions Bob Abberley, head of health at Unison, argued that it was "a time for unity, not throwing stones". Unison had thought it politic to negotiate a compromise over local pay rather than see a system imposed on health workers.

In a question and answer session which followed the RCN president's speech, comments by Mr Bowis were greeted with considerable scepticism by delegates. Asked whether the message from congress would be that people should vote Labour or Liberal Democrat, Christine Hancock, general secretary of the college, noticeably failed to reject such an interpretation.

She said: "There is no doubt they showed their concern about several of the Government's policies in particular real concern about the fragmentation of the health service and a significant part of that is the approach to pay."

The conference is due today to debate a motion proposing that the nurses' pay review body "is no longer an appropriate method of determining nurses' pay".

Last year the body proposed a 1 per cent national increase together with a suggestion that trusts might negotiate a further 2 per cent. This year it has offered 1 per cent nationwide rise with no figure recommended for trust-based bargaining.

To cries of "rubbish" Mr Bowis suggested that the present shortage of nurses was a local issue rather than a national one and that trusts had been given the flexibility on pay to address the problem.

He said there had been a real increase in nurses' pay of 70 per cent since the Conservatives came to power in 1979. Under the last Labour Government their standard of living had fallen, he said.

The cool and sometimes noisy reception afforded Mr Bowis contrasted with a far more favourable response to Harriet Harman, Labour's health spokeswoman, and Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democrats.

Ms Harman indicated that a Labour government might agree a degree of flexibility locally, but there would not be "hundreds of different pay scales" operated by different trusts all over the country.

Such a system inevitably led to "leap-frogging", "head-hunting" and then nurses being forced to leave patients in order to negotiate their pay.

Mr Hughes said it was a "scandal" that local pay had been introduced and that the Liberal Democrats supported a system of national minimum wages which they would not expect to be topped up by trusts.

In opposition to the RCN president's call for a separation of the nurses away from other health workers, Mr Hughes said the NHS would be covered by one review body.