{"id":277502,"date":"2025-11-22T16:17:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T16:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/277502\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T16:17:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T16:17:24","slug":"ni-health-mike-nesbitt-u-turn-leaves-careworkers-demotivated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/277502\/","title":{"rendered":"NI Health: Mike Nesbitt “U-turn” leaves careworkers demotivated"},"content":{"rendered":"

“This sector which is often lifesaving cannot compete with retail and hospitality that often offer more stable income and predictable hours.”<\/p>\n

In the letter, she said members support fair pay for all NHS staff, but said the decision to award nothing from the entire NHS pay-review uplift of \u00a3209m<\/a> to the independent social care workforce is “indefensible”.<\/p>\n

In recent years, the DoH has publicly said that pay discrepancy between health care workers must be addressed and be resolved.<\/p>\n

In February, Nesbitt told the health committee that the RLW would be funded and that money had been identified to begin delivering it for independent social care workers.<\/p>\n

In July, the Health and Social Care NI Reset Plan<\/a> said the system needs to be stabilised and committed an investment of an additional \u00a325m in the independent social care sector to support the introduction of the RLW building on the previous year’s investment of \u00a370m.<\/p>\n

In December 2022, senior health officials told the Stormont health committee that “all-new domiciliary care procurement would be required to reflect the RLW uplift. Also, the procurement policy states that all future social care contracts would be built on the RLW”.<\/p>\n

The DoH established a Fair Work Forum to address low pay in social care and in September a business case was established.<\/p>\n

According to Ms Shepherd, all these moves and public commitments have given false hope to staff who are mostly women with many single-parent families.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“This sector which is often lifesaving cannot compete with retail and hospitality that often offer more stable income…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-277502","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}