Celebrating the HP campaign

This week we are celebrating our Health Practitioners campaign that has forged historic career recognition for all HPs.

I hope to see you at one of our special HP get-togethers that we are holding right around our state as part of our union’s HP Celebration Week – a fitting close to a 4 year campaign that’s enhanced the careers of HP staff throughout Queensland Health.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that we were protesting, rolling up to rallies throughout Queensland, calling for health practitioners to be properly recognised and putting in place work bans to make our point.

That was about 3 years ago. It’s certainly been a struggle to ensure health practitioners are finally recognised and properly valued by the employer.

You’ll find summaries of the gains we’ve made for health practitioners in the links to the right.

Together, our efforts have delivered real results. We stood up and reshaped the working landscape for HPs by getting long-deserved career respect:

• We won a brand new collective agreement for health practitioners.
• We said ‘no’ to woeful wages that simply did not remunerate health practitioners for the work done.
• We secured base wage increases of 15.5% over 3 years.
• We ensured health practitioners’ expertise was properly captured in a clearly defined career structure.

A brand new work level evaluation team was formed to articulate the career framework for HPs.

We had to step up the campaign just a few days ago, when HPs across Queensland wore badges, emblazoned with the message, ‘It’s Time – Finish It Now!’ to ensure QH completed Phase 2 work level evaluations. I’ve been advised HPs will be informed about evaluation results shortly.

Many will see immediate benefits and an effective appeals process will ensure HPs roles are properly defined and recognised.

We’ll be in touch about that the HP appeals process shortly. While health practitioners have secured numerous career advancements and wins, we face substantial ongoing challenges. We all know more must be done to improve working conditions and wages in the future.

For now, let’s take some time to celebrate. We can be proud of our efforts. But let there be no doubt - we are determined to continue to build better lives for all health practitioners.

Yours in union,
Alex Scott
General Secretary!