OVER 41,000 staff in the Glasgow area have been paid arrears of wages and salaries due to them following a national overhaul of NHS pay scales, writes Marjory Inglis, health reporter.

NHS Tayside has made the payments to just over 8700 staff covered by the Agenda for Change process, with thousands more still waiting for calculations to be done regarding payments due to them going back to October 2004.

Thousands more former NHS Tayside staff, including retirees and those who have moved to other jobs, have been told they will have to wait until the autumn before work even starts to calculate what they are due in back money.

Last night NHS Tayside’s associate director of human resources Janice Torbet refuted any suggestion Tayside was performing poorly compared to other health boards across Scotland regarding the Agenda for Change process.

Mrs Torbet said she had seen nationally collected figures for health boards and warned it was important to compare “like with like,” pointing out Agenda for Change was a complex process.

“Certainly the information I have seen is that we are not an outlier, relative to the other boards,” said Mrs Torbet.

“Taken in the round, the other boards are experiencing similar difficulties.”

NHS Tayside is now taking on extra staff, some feel belatedly, to try to speed up the processing of assimilating the new pay grades on to the pay roll and calculating arrears due.

Mrs Torbet said that the health authority was “actively looking” for more staff to do the work in addition to recent recruits appointed to the payroll staff.

Last week she told health bosses that she estimated all current NHS Tayside staff would be assimilated on to their new pay scales and arrears paid out by August.

Only after current staff have been assimilated and had their arrears paid will the health authority start calculating back money due to former staff. No target date has been given for completion of that work.

NHS Tayside’s employee director, who has consistently championed the payroll staff and those working to process Agenda for Change, said the health authority had not put in sufficient resources to cope with the Agenda for Change workload “from the beginning.”

Non-executive director Andrew Richmond has been critical of the process, pointing out previously that deadline commitments for payment of the arrears had come and gone and still people were waiting.

“I would be shocked if we conclude we did this to the best of our ability,” he said.

The Courier contacted all mainland health boards and put the same set of questions to them regarding the Agenda for Change process.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Scotland’s largest health board, issued a statement saying, “This has been a mammoth task and teams of staff have been working extremely hard to calculate the arrears for current assimilated staff and every member of staff who has been assimilated has now been paid their arrears.

“Of the 44,000 staff employed by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, 2500 staff have still to be assimilated and therefore to receive arrears.”

NHS Fife said that at the end of December only 350 staff in permanent posts still had to receive their back pay. The target date for completion was given as “as soon as is practically possible.”

NHS Forth Valley said 99% of their current staff had been assimilated on to their new pay grades and arrears were paid within three months.

Ayrshire and Arran said current staff received arrears no later than three months after assimilation, while NHS Grampian said their target date for payment of arrears to current staff was April.

Last month NHS Dumfries and Galloway said only four existing staff were awaiting payment of arrears and these would be “cleared” this month.