WORKING for the NHS is physically, mentally and emotionally demanding. To suggest that NHS workers should be forced to work until they are 65 is living in cloud cuckoo land.
It is a highly stressful environment because of the rapid changes in technology, the rapid turnover of patients and constant reforms and changes.
73% of paramedics are already forced to retire through ill-health before they reach the age of 60, let alone carry on until they are 65.
Forcing staff to work longer will simply raise the level of ill-health retirements and end up costing the NHS more.
If staff continue to work in vital occupations to avoid reducing their pension benefits there are until 65 before retiring. age. possible risks to patients, who may find themselves being cared for by people whose capability is compromised by age-related problems, but who are not eligible for ill-health retirement.
Under the proposals, all new NHS employees joining from 2006 would be asked to work up to the age of 65, while existing employees who have not hit 60 by 2013 will be required to work
Even the timid Royal College of Nursing has come out against the changes saying that nearly all its members oppose the increased retirement MPs will be retiring at the next election with a five-star pension package while plotting to make NHS staff work longer for less pension. tives, and nothing UNISON does will alter that."
Minister David Milliband has claimed that the public sector pension scheme was drawn up at a time when people lived only 10 years into retirement, and clearly ministers and British employers are resentful of the cost of paying pensions to anyone living any longer than that.
But in fact average life expectancy for hospital cleaning staff and similarly lowpaid public sector staff has not increased at all in the last 30 years.
The lowest paid section of the workforce can on average look forward to just 8 healthy years of retirement after they
Blair's government have already decided as a matter of policy to increase the normal
pension age in all public sector schemes from 60 to 65 years. This proposal alone
cuts the value of schemes by up to 30
percent. years.
Proposals to switch from final salary to career average schemes in the civil service and now the NHS are also causing widespread concern and could lead to similar proposals elsewhere.
UNISON is at last mounting a co-ordinated campaign against the proposals, and working with other unions and the TUC to resist these changes, which are due to hit local government staff in April.
Similar increases in retirement age have also been proposed for schemes covering teachers, civil servants, health workers and firefightersalthough these would not take