I'm sitting at the back of the audience for the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust annual public meeting. Martin Hindle has given an introduction and Angus Maitland is presenting a review of the UHL's last twelve months.

I'm waiting to see if he talks about the decision to contract with Capita for our payroll (which has been a complete disaster seeing thousands of staff wrongly paid) or to invite private health company Birkdale to operate on our patients at Glenfield. Birkdale's contract was suspended after orthopaedic consultants raised concerns about the quality of the operations carried out.

He does identify that 'staff satisfaction' is very low, according to recent surveys. He promises that this will be a high priority for the coming year but he doesn't give any specifics.

I am here, as secretary of the Unison branch covering 1,500 UHL staff, to raise three issues.

Sterile services staff are facing the threat of being privatised, and we want to challenge the UHL's intention to shut their Sterile Services Departments and instead pay a private company to sterilise our surgical equipment. We believe it would pose unacceptable risks to patients as well as pushing 70 experienced staff out of the NHS.

Meanwhile several medical secretaries have come to the meeting to challenge the Trust's Admin and Clerical Review which is proposing the introduction of a centralised typing pool and making secretaries work for three consultants instead of one. A typing pool idea has been tried in many other hospitals and we fear that it will lead to more mistakes in the letters being typed and more missed appointments.

Thirdly we are now in formal dispute with the UHL in support of our members working for the private contractors - Serco, ISS and Medirest - who provide cleaning, portering, catering and related services at the UHL. The national framework agreement on private contractor staff says that they should receive the same pay and terms and conditions as those of us who work directly for the UHL - backdated to October 2006 when the agreement came in to force. But the UHL have refused to implement that agreement, saying that they can only afford to pay the new costs to the contractors for this year.

If I can, I will be trying to ask questions on behalf of these three groups of our members.

Carole Ribbins is now talking about initiatives related to the Trust's efforts to deliver "Caring at its best". And no, Angus Maitland didn't mention Capita or Birkdale!