NHS employee? You can apply for 60,000 FREE Avios worth at least £480

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In May 2020, Avios asked members to donate points towards an appeal for NHS staff. The plan was to reward NHS workers for their efforts during the pandemic.

As we reported here, 305 million Avios were donated. IAG Loyalty donated 210 million and members donated 95 million.

If you are an NHS employee, you can now apply for a share, worth at least 60,000 Avios.

2,000 NHS staff have already received 60,000 Avios each via a nominations process run by Avios and NHS management.

Another 3,000 NHS staff can now apply directly to receive a gift of 60,000 Avios.

How do you apply for your free Avios?

Anyone with an nhs.net, nhs.scot, nhs.uk, hscni.net or similar email address qualifies to receive 60,000 Avios.

You need to visit this page of ba.com and submit the online form by 23rd December. The rules have been changed during Saturday to confirm that ALL NHS staff in the UK can apply.

It is a free draw. You do not need to justify what you would do with the Avios or what you have done to deserve them. Avios will select 3,000 people at random from those who apply and award them 60,000 points each.

If fewer than 3,000 people apply, each applicant will receive a larger prize so that the entire 180 million Avios are allocated.

If you are a winner, you will receive your Avios by 13th February 2022.

60,000 Avios should be worth over £600 of free flights – our core article on what Avios points are worth is here.

The worse case scenario is that you convert them into 96,000 Nectar points. This will get you £480 of free shopping at Sainsbury’s or Argos.

Please share this article ….

Even if you are not an NHS employee yourself, you are likely to know someone who is. Please send them a link to this article or share it via social media so that as many people as possible can benefit.

If you donated Avios during the NHS appeal last year, your points are going to good homes.

You can make your application via ba.com here.

Category

British Airways and Avios

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

Jackie says:

10 Dec10 December 08:12

My son is a gp in the nhs working 8-8 shifts with constant daily abuse as too many patients and too few gps- has Covid twice already.
Interesting that his is not an nhs email but a doctors.org and thus is not even included in this!
- James Vickers says:
  
  10 Dec10 December 08:49
  
  Exactly the point of limiting this to people with NHS emails
- Jonathan says:
  
  10 Dec10 December 12:51
  
  He should be able to get an NHS e-Mail through his CCG. Doctors.org is a private enterprise that was setup in the days before nhs.net & as they verify that all applicants are GMC registered & the service is encrypted for e-mails that don’t leave their servers it was the original method of secure communication in the medical profession.
  
  I believe that some trusts are considering moving back to their own xxxxx.nhs.uk domains though as it is cheaper than the nhs.net fees.
Alan says:

10 Dec10 December 08:18

What a surprise from London Airways to have the offer only open for England, as ever ignoring the rest of the UK…
- Callum says:
  
  11 Dec11 December 09:14
  
  What a surprise, person on the internet can’t be bothered to look into whether something is true before posting it. (Hint: it’s not)
dst87 says:

10 Dec10 December 08:25

Thanks for posting! I’ve got some family who work in nursing in England who I’ve passed this on to. Fingers crossed for them!
BJ says:

10 Dec10 December 08:27

@Callum, heroes is a narrative pushed by the media and politicians, that is why I used those terms. Contribution has to be taken in a wider context of numbers employed in different sectors, and risk and hazards are so complex it is difficult to generalise. There has also been a lot more to keeping the country running than simply caring for peopkes healthiness, and my comment was that this should be recognised too. In any case I never made my comment in either the meaning or spirit you and others might taken them but I did not intend any offense by them and I have said sorry for that in another comment.
- Harry T says:
  
  10 Dec10 December 08:35
  
  I don’t actually like the term heroes being applied to healthcare staff, as it implies that we should be sacrificing ourselves for the greater good. I think it also plays into the attempts of certain political parties to avoid giving appropriate pay to “heroes” – the work is considered its own reward in that context. The reality is that these heroes should be paid an appropriate amount and given appropriate protection, instead of being rewarded with below inflation pay “rises”, inadequate PPE and poor working conditions.
  
  I do, to some extent, agree with BJ’s point there have been many unsung “heroes” of the pandemic in various fields that have not been appreciated in a high profile manner by the press or various organisations. But I also object to a vocal minority who pretend that their work is in any way comparable to working in frontline healthcare during an unprecedented global health crisis – you’re not really a “key worker” unless you are difficult to replace and/or have a very valuable skill set that is directly relevant to a pandemic. There seem to be certain groups who think that stocking shelves is just as important as working as an ICU nurse – the reality is that not everyone is a special snowflake and some jobs are much more skilled, disproportionately harder and far more difficult to replace.
  - ediflyer says:
    
    10 Dec10 December 09:28
    
    Well said, Harry – I don’t like the ‘heroes’ term either and agree with the likely reason the Gov’t support it. I also suspect BA have just been incredibly lazy in this promo and thought “how can we make some gesture with minimal effort? – let’s just say those with an nhs.net address” not realising they exclude the rest of the UK.
- Callum says:
  
  11 Dec11 December 09:38
  
  This is why your apology seems very hollow to me. You did not just say that “other people need to be recognised too”, you called this “NHS heroes rubbish” then proclaimed that the “real heroes” are actually those who work in logistics.
  
  I’m fully willing to accept that you didn’t mean it that way and move on, but to deny you’ve said it (when it’s right there in black and white!) is insulting in and of itself!
  
  And I have no issue with people not thinking NHS staff are heroes – it’s not the phrase I’d use and I have never thought of myself that way either (it’s a job – yes, a million times more stressful than working in Tesco and with a lower salary, but a job none-the-less). It’s specifically stating that they AREN’T heroes then calling other people “the real heroes” I have a problem with.
  
  You also seem to be ignoring the point I’ve made continuously – the stressful part of the job is NOT the increased hazards/risk of death. I would love to see you sitting with a dying patient you’ve been looking after for weeks, who barely even knows where they are any more, gasping for breath and writhing in pain, while their family attempt to talk to them over an iPad crying their eyes out and then try and tell me that the people working in logistics, as important as they are, are the ones who have it tough (or even equally as tough)!
Hugh says:

10 Dec10 December 08:29

oh my god, these comments – someone decided to give them to NHS workers END OF
- _Tom says:
  
  10 Dec10 December 10:29
  
  + 1. These angry comments and hatred over 60K Avios are madness!
  - Mikeact says:
    
    10 Dec10 December 10:55
    
    What ‘hatred’ is that referring to ?
Amy says:

10 Dec10 December 08:32

It just gives away more about the character of those ‘missing out on perks’ tbh.
Aston100 says:

10 Dec10 December 08:39

Pretty sure the majority of the 1m+ NHS workforce are not ‘frontline’ or ‘patient facing’.
Perks and offers that blanket benefit all NHS staff are unfair to those in other sectors who put themselves at risk far more than say a desktop support engineer.
Teachers who were forced to effectively babysit younger children for a while last year come to mind.

I note Morrisons quietly dispensed with their 10% discount for teaching staff earlier this year, but have carried on with NHS staff.

I get that there probably isn’t a way to specifically target front line staff, but this isn’t right.
- Harry T says:
  
  10 Dec10 December 08:45
  
  Some NHS management and admin workers were alleged to have put themselves forwards for vaccination before some of the genuine frontline staff had received them… bottom line is that life isn’t fair and there is no reliable means of defining and filtering worthy parties within the health service.
  
  Being a teacher during the pandemic has certainly been rough – I have family members who teach – but I don’t think it’s quite the same as working in ICU.
  
  Anyone getting triggered about these sort of gestures needs to understand that the companies are only targeting NHS workers because it’s good PR for them and may encourage additional spend from that target demographic. I don’t think Morrison’s or BA really give a monkeys about the various struggles of NHS staff during the pandemic.
- Ken says:
  
  10 Dec10 December 08:48
  
  “Pretty sure the majority of the 1m+ NHS workforce are not ‘frontline’ or ‘patient facing’.”
  
  More than 50% are professionally qualified clinical staff, a tiny minority of whom will not be patient facing.
  Then there are all the ancillary staff – porters moving patients, cleaners etc.
  Still frontline when you are pushing sick patients, or cleaning Covid ridden wards.
  
  Or do these people not count in your world?
  
  Typically Tory narrative that the NHS full of pen pushers and admin staff twiddling their thumbs
  - Amy says:
    
    10 Dec10 December 08:55
    
    Our fianance team found themselves running the vaccination hub. So even those not traditionally patient facing were not ‘on a 2 year holiday’. What isn’t fair is the PFI contracts meaning all of our porters, cleaners and many more, all of whom faced significant risk on low pay are subcontractors. No NHS.net email for them
  - Paul Pogba says:
    
    10 Dec10 December 09:24
    
    Its not just a Tory narrative, the Kings Fund has documented the rise of administrators:
    
    “In 2009, the NHS employed the full-time equivalent of 1,177,056 staff (1,431,996 headcount), of whom 42,509 were managers or senior managers. While the total number of NHS staff increased by around 35 per cent between 1999 and 2009, the number of managers increased by 82 per cent over the same period, from 23,378 to 42,509. As a proportion of NHS staff, the number of managers rose from 2.7 per cent in 1999 to 3.6 per cent in 2009.”
    
    https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/general-election-2010/how-many-managers
    
    As IT became more prevalent most organisations reduced the number of administrators, the NHS managed an increase.
    - ken says:
      
      10 Dec10 December 10:58
      
      Governments want the impossible from the NHS most of which are diametrically opposed.
      
      They want commercialisation and marketisation but less transactional & finanace costs.
      
      They want local individual enterprise and autonomy, but god forbid that service should be better in one area aka ‘postcode lottery’.
      
      They want it ‘free of red tape’ but insist on endless central diktats to measure the flavour of the month.
      
      They want less management but world class procurement and organization.
      
      It’s far from perfect and maybe continental social insurance with an element of co pay would have been a better route 75 years ago, but we are where we are. The cost of system change are unviable.
      
      The biggest problem is that we are an aging population, with substantial numbers of people who have chronic health problems. We are getting fatter and taking less exercise.
      Many look after their health, diet & exercise very well (largely the well educated and well off) but unfortunatly many don’t, or are past the point of being able to mitigate diabetes, heart and lung problems and obesity, and lets be honest will be a drain on the health service for the last decade or 2 of their lives.
      
      No health system in the world can tackle that.
      - Tariq says:
        
        11 Dec11 December 10:48
        
        Most sensible post in this whole article from Ken TBH
    - Geoggy says:
      
      10 Dec10 December 19:16
      
      Blame Lansley Mr Daily Torygraph
    - Callum says:
      
      11 Dec11 December 09:43
      
      The same Kings Fund that published a report stating that the NHS has FAR fewer managers than organisations of its size normally has? And which holds the opinion that the NHS is, I quote, “under- rather than over-managed”?
- bazza says:
  
  10 Dec10 December 11:48
  
  “desktop support engineer” who has to go into every area of the hospital with every patient, you people just don’t get it!
WillPS says:

10 Dec10 December 08:41

Amazes me how entitled some of the commenters on here are. Get over yourselves.
- Amy says:
  
  10 Dec10 December 09:00
  
  It would be illuminating to cross reference some of those comments against posts outraged that they have to spend £15 to trigger shop small this time!