SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

shar­lene.ram­per­sad@guardian.co.tt

 

Al­though Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has promised to pay nurs­es their out­stand­ing in­cre­ments, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Reg­is­tered Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion (TTR­NA) says it will go ahead with Wednes­day’s mass protest.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia on Mon­day, TTR­NA pres­i­dent Idi Stu­art was hes­i­tant to re­veal ex­act­ly what in­cre­ments would be paid or the time­line for pay­ment, say­ing the as­so­ci­a­tion wants to wait un­til Wednes­day to re­veal that in­for­ma­tion to its mem­ber­ship.

But Stu­art al­so said that while ‘cer­tain’ promis­es were made, the TTR­NA has not re­ceived any­thing in writ­ing from the Min­istry.

“The min­istry has put out an olive branch as it were, noth­ing has been re­solved, we will be wait­ing for black and white doc­u­ments,” Stu­art said.

He said af­ter the of­fi­cial an­nounce­ment has been made on Wednes­day, the as­so­ci­a­tion will be check­ing in with nurs­es to see whether the Min­istry and the Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties (RHAs) are keep­ing to their word.

“There has been one pos­i­tive that has come out of this and we would want to com­mend the Min­is­ter of Health about his promis­es on in­cre­ments owed. We want to re­mind the pub­lic that we are work­ing on 2013 salaries and even those 2013 salaries are not up to date. Cer­tain com­mit­ments were made, which we will in­form our mem­bers on Ju­ly 1 on what those com­mit­ments are and we are ask­ing our mem­bers to let us know if it is ac­tu­al­ly hap­pen­ing at the RHAs.”

Stu­art said the hir­ing of nurs­es in tem­po­rary po­si­tions was an­oth­er is­sue ad­dressed dur­ing the meet­ing.

He said nurs­es are be­ing made to car­ry out the same du­ties as their per­ma­nent coun­ter­parts, with­out any of the ben­e­fits or sta­bil­i­ty of a per­ma­nent po­si­tion.

“We made it clear through our lawyers that you can’t have per­sons work­ing along with each oth­er with the same job ti­tles, yet be­ing of­fered dif­fer­ent re­mu­ner­a­tion pack­ages- tem­po­rary work­ers en­joy no gra­tu­ity, no pen­sion, they don’t en­joy the sta­bil­i­ty of per­ma­nent em­ploy­ment-we went through that in de­tail and they said they will take spe­cif­ic steps to rec­ti­fy that.”

On their call for health in­sur­ance, haz­ard pay and death ben­e­fits, Stu­art said Deyals­ingh has main­tained that those is­sues are be­fore the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer (CPO.) But that ex­cuse is no longer enough for the as­so­ci­a­tion, he said.

“The CPO is guid­ed by the Par­lia­ment and we would like to hear from the Par­lia­ment if they are con­sid­er­ing health in­sur­ance, haz­ard al­lowance and death ben­e­fits. On Ju­ly 1 we will be ask­ing our mem­bers what they would want to hap­pen go­ing for­ward to dri­ve home to the Cab­i­net that this is im­por­tant to us,” Stu­art said.

He said with the protest go­ing ahead as planned, he is ask­ing the pub­lic to be un­der­stand­ing to the plight of nurs­es.

And de­spite the as­so­ci­a­tion’s meet­ing with Deyals­ingh, Stu­art said the protest could have been avoid­ed al­to­geth­er if nurs­es were treat­ed months ago.

“All of these protests and demon­stra­tions could have been avoid­ed if the Min­istry saw it fit to in­clude one of the largest stake­hold­ers in the health care sys­tem in the de­ci­sion-mak­ing process.”

Look­ing ahead to the 2020 Gen­er­al Elec­tion, Stu­art said the as­so­ci­a­tion plans to do some ’screen­ing’ of its own.

“We don’t want to go through this ever again where the min­is­ter of health don’t see it im­por­tant to in­clude the stake­hold­ers so we will be writ­ing to all po­lit­i­cal par­ties and ask­ing them who are their Min­is­ters of Health and we would ad­vise our mem­bers ac­cord­ing­ly who we pre­fer to work with,” Stu­art said.

The mass protest is card­ed to start at 8 am on Wednes­day at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah and fin­ish at the Min­istry of Health’s head­quar­ters on Park Street.