Review of profiles for nursing and midwifery roles
The NHS Staff Council Job Evaluation Group (JEG) is grateful for all who responded to the nursing and midwifery (bands 4 to 6) consultation and is working its way through the feedback over the coming weeks.
The NHS Staff Council joint chairs have agreed that the revised band 4 to 6 profiles will only be published once the review of the full suite has been completed. This is likely to be early 2025, after the band 7 (and above) consultation takes place in late Autumn 2024.
However, employers are reminded that the need to ensure roles are banded correctly is an ongoing requirement regardless of the reviews to profiles and JEG encourage employers to work with staff to ensure that their job descriptions are up-to-date and accurately reflect the requirements of their role. Where this leads to job description revisions, roles will need to be re-banded using the NHS Job Evaluation Handbook’s changed jobs process (chapter 3 of the JE Handbook).
The advice from the NHS Staff Council on job descriptions continues to be as follows:
- Having up-to-date, agreed job descriptions is good HR practice, their main purpose being to ensure that employees and their line managers have a common understanding of what is required of the jobholder; the required information is generally set out in the form of a list of job duties.
- Having person specifications available for all posts is good HR practice, as it facilitates the recruitment process.
- Up-to-date, agreed job descriptions and person specifications will facilitate matching and make it more accurate and efficient.
- Job descriptions should not follow the national job evaluation profile format, as profiles are not job descriptions and do not fulfil the main purpose of a job description.
- Information required for matching, which is not usually included in job descriptions or person specifications (for example, in relation to the effort and environment factors) can be collected by other means, for instance, by short questionnaire.
- Job evaluation measures the demands of the job, not the competency of the person in the job. Therefore a job description which is exclusively competence based is not helpful for matching purposes.
- There is no recommended format - The format and content of job descriptions are matters for individual organisations to agree in partnership and should be appropriate to the needs of the organisation.
Further information
- Find out more about job evaluation.
- Further detail on the nursing and midwifery profile review work.
