Working Professional Profiles, Simplified

There are three classifications for working professionals (health science professionals who aren’t in a supervisory or leadership position) in the new profile-based classification system.

Disclaimer: this explanation is general and isn’t intended to cover every nuance. If you have a specific question, please take a look at the reference documents or reach out to @email.

P1: Working Professional

The P1 working professional profile will be where the majority of health science professional jobs match. This is the classification for the highly-trained and highly-qualified health science professionals who do the work that keeps our health care system running.

Being matched to this profile means that you’re using your post-secondary qualifications to – depending on your specific profession – work with patients/clients or perform diagnostic procedures.

This profile encompasses classifications that are, under the current classification system, called by a wide range of terms including grade 1, staff level, sole charge, student supervision, and working without general supervision. If your job is correctly classified as one of these terms under the current classification system, the job is almost certainly rightly matched with the P1 profile of the new system.

P2A: Special Procedures/Techniques

If your job involves working with patients/clients or performing diagnostic procedures – but doing work that is above the P1 level, then your job might match with the P2A special procedures/techniques profile.

This profile is for jobs that “involve a specialized area of practice [within your specific profession] which in turn requires a recognized level of expertise or competency obtained through specialized education, training and experience which is over and above the P1 working level and is required in order to carry out the duties”. Essentially, this means that your job involves work that couldn’t be done by another member of your profession who doesn’t have your specialized education, training, or experience.

For example, some current special procedures/techniques are computed tomography (CT scanning) for radiological technologists and cardiac rhythm devices for cardiology technologists.

One of the reasons that HSA’s classifications experts are excited about the new classification system is the chance to add more types of work to this P2A profile. Right now, only 3 of the 70+ health science professions have special procedures/techniques – meaning that moving to the new classification system gives us the ability to add special procedures/techniques for all the professions.

Having your job matched to the P2A profile is through a specific process – you don’t have to file an objection or a grievance. You can start the process by sending an email to us at @email with a. the name of your specialized area of practice within your profession and b. details about the “specialized education, training and experience” that one needs to be able to work in your area.

Staff in your union’s classifications department are working right now to review member submissions and investigate the details. If the special procedure/technique that your job requires is added to the P2A profile, members who do that work will either be reclassified and paid at the P2A level (if that’s what they do for the majority of their time) or coded up to the P2A rate (on shifts when they perform the special procedure/technique).

P2B: Advanced Working Professional

Unlike P1 and P2A, the main purpose of P2B jobs is not performing diagnostic procedures or working with patients/clients. Instead, the main purpose of jobs that fit the P2B profile is to provide clinical and/or technical advice and guidance to other health science professionals.

This profile encompasses jobs that are, under the current classification system, classified as grade III, grade IV, grade V and grade VI.

There are five “sub-profiles” of the P2B profile, depending on the specific type of advice and guidance that you provide.