Your Choice services – more staff leaving and negative impact on staff morale

UNISON has for the last two weeks been trying to establish what plans Your Choice are putting in place for consultation with Parents/Carers.

After Parents/Carers threatened a Judicial Review Your Choice put some of their restructure plans on hold.

However, Your Choice has allowed a sixth of the workforce to go before the consultation begins. This has had a terrible impact on morale of the frontline workforce and we are now receiving news that more staff are finding alternative jobs with others applying to get out of Your Choice services. For instance 60% of staff working in Barnet Independent Living Service have already left the service.

UNISON has asked Your Choice on a number of occasions to provide details of their  consultation plans in order we can try and bring some stability to the workforce. UNISON has advised our members not to leave and wait to hear the outcome of the consultation. Many of our members have provided a quality service and built up strong relationships with services users and carers. It is UNISON’s view that this strength is being undermined by the restructure and worsened by the lack of information sharing. We are concerned that the high turnover of staff in these type of services increases the likelihood of a serious incident in the workplace.

On the Your Choice website here http://www.yourchoicebarnet.org/news/2013/06/2013/06/consultation-process-update/ it states: 

Our announcement giving the Board’s decisions on our restructuring proposals said that decisions concerning Valley Way and Supported Living changes will be postponed until a full consultation has been completed.

This will be held with service users, parents and carers of both services.  The Valley Way consultation will be for six weeks, followed immediately by the Supported Living consultation which will be for a further six weeks. The Valley Way invitation and consultation document will be sent out by 12 July, inviting families to personal meetings during the week of 22 July.

We’ll post further updates as we progress.

This provides very little useful information.

UNISON produced a response to the staff consultation which you can read here we are concerned that the stability of the workforce is being further undermined by the lack of information/communication to the workforce and the trade unions.   

Look out for further updates