Coulter slams “mean” pay-rise for Nurses
Rev Dr Robert Coulter, the North Antrim Ulster Unionist Assembly member, who is also the Ulster Unionist Health spokesman, has described the Government’s 1.9% pay award to nurses as “derisory and an effective pay cut”, given that inflation is currently running at 2.7%.
Assemblyman Coulter said this “totally mean” pay rise for nurses was clear proof the National Health Service was suffering from what he branded as “terminal managementitis”.
The UUP MLA, who has just won his third successive Assembly election, added: “Nurses and other health professionals can expect to receive a rise of 1.5 per cent in April and a further one per cent in November, equivalent to an annual increase of about 1.9 per cent.
“This will lead to still more nurses walking away from the health service and going abroad. It is already a very worrying trend. This award will mean less than £500 extra a year for a newly qualified nurse earning around £19,000.
“Nurses and doctors are the most valuable element in our health service, yet here we have nurses getting what amounts to a pay cut and family doctors getting no increase at all. Yet the number of bureaucrats continues to rise.
“There is a culture of “managementitis” which, under the guise of making things more efficient, is actually a massive waste of taxpayers’ money.
“It is time we had a cull of all these layers of meaningless management pursuing endless targets they themselves set and put health professionals back in charge of the health service with a new culture of patient centredness and health professional leadership,” argued Assemblyman Dr Coulter.