Your PSA and Delegates had our first Joint Consultative Committee (JCC) meeting of 2024.

The JCC allows PSA members to communicate directly with Health Professional Councils Authority (HPCA) Executive and aims to address PSA/staff concerns and improve the focus and direction of HPCA initiatives.

The JCC meeting was held on 31 January 2024 and a PSA members meeting was held on 14 February 2024. Please advise if you did not see a bulletin about this meeting.

At the JCC, HPCA Executive voiced their continued commitment to working with PSA members, in particular around workload and burnout.

Ameer and Robert advised that they would be acknowledging workload and burnout concerns at the February Huddle, emphasising that managers should be monitoring excess hours worked when approving timesheets.

At the Huddle, managers were verbally advised that they should be flagging excess hours and having conversations with staff whose hours are at an excess so that strategies can be put in place to prevent burnout.

The PSA and Members believe that there needs to be a process for documenting excess hours and an escalation process for when there are continued excess hours worked. The process needs to include support for that manager, in the event that work needs to be reallocated or reduced for that staff member. Your Delegate, Clare suggested this is something Members can develop and bring to Exec as a proposal. Key members from the 14 February 2024 meeting are working on this offline.

Another way to assist excessive workload is for there to be some standard practices across the Councils on how best to allocate matters. 1 matter does not equal another. Some suggestions made have been a more robust and standardised ‘weighting’ method to scale the complexity of matters and how to define an active case vs an inactive case. We will gather some information and take it back to the Executive.

Members will receive a request for information including existing materials, methods and tools used by Councils to measure and allocate cases in due course.

Remember, it is as much your responsibility to raise excessive workload. If your manager doesn’t know, they can’t help to fix the issue. If you have raised concerns and feel you are being ignored, reach out to your PSA for assistance.

The PSA has raised staffing and vacancies. We have seen roles sit unfilled for long periods of time, and this leads to excessive workload. We got a commitment out of HPCA to fill vacancies quickly in line with Ministry of Health recruitment guidelines. A training role has also been filled to assist new staff and free up existing staff capacity for core work. Ameer has advised that a number of limited duration roles are being filled to assist in the short term, however it is likely that we will need to continue to hold this commitment to account and work on filling longer term roles.

This should lead to less vacancies, more resources and less overwork and burnout. If you are aware of a long-term vacancy within your Council, bring it to the attention of HR or the PSA.

On the next Red Tape, check out your workplace delegate Clare Angel-Auld receiving an Award from Management in recognition of the union work carried out at HPCA. Excellent work Clare!