Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Dis­grun­tled nurs­es are call­ing for the Min­is­ter of Health and the chair­man of the North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) to in­ter­vene to ad­dress their con­cerns about over­time pay­ment, staffing and gen­er­al work­ing con­di­tions.

Short­ly af­ter 8 am yes­ter­day, crowds of nurs­es clad in black t-shirts and po­los were seen walk­ing from the NCRHA’s ad­min­is­tra­tion build­ing on Block 39 at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex in Mt Hope as they marched around the en­trance in si­lence.

The nurs­es then head­ed to the main en­trance of the build­ing on the north­ern part of the com­pound, where they gath­ered briefly be­fore re­turn­ing in­side.

On Sat­ur­day, the NCRHA re­vealed a de­ci­sion tak­en by of­fi­cials to re­duce the over­time rates from $75 an hour to $60. It has been re­port­ed that the NCRHA chair­man took is­sue with what was de­scribed as sev­er­al “ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties” where nurs­es were record­ed as work­ing be­tween 200 to 400 hours in full over­time.

Such ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties, he said, amount­ed to an es­ti­mat­ed $36 mil­lion per year.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia dur­ing the pro­ces­sion, reg­is­tered nurse as­signed to the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, Ria St John-Acos­ta, said the demon­stra­tion was in­tend­ed to high­light is­sues con­fronting nurs­es in the work­place.

She al­so took is­sue with Gopeesingh’s de­ci­sion to re­duce over­time rates known as pool pay. She ar­gued that while the fig­ures pre­sent­ed were in­ac­cu­rate, it was not un­com­mon for nurs­es to be paid over­time for car­ry­ing out the work of more than one per­son or even be­ing called to work on sched­uled off-days be­cause hos­pi­tals are un­der­staffed.

“If you pro­vide an av­enue for nurs­es to make ex­tra mon­ey and you do not pay nurs­es ad­e­quate­ly and you don’t staff your hos­pi­tal, then it’s not our fault.

“You know if nurs­es don’t make pool or work over­time, the whole sys­tem will shut down be­cause we don’t have enough staff. Some­times you’re forced to work over­time be­cause who is re­liev­ing you? There’s no one to re­lieve you.

“So you’re say­ing we should work for free. You’re check­ing this mon­ey and say­ing nurs­es are work­ing for so much and so on, why don’t you tell the pub­lic why nurs­es are forced to work over­time and pool?”

When asked about is­sues re­lat­ing to a short­age of staff and a build-up of pa­tients at Mt Hope last week, St John-Acos­ta said the is­sues were not as a re­sult of any in­dus­tri­al ac­tion by the nurs­es, but were a clear re­flec­tion of the staffing is­sues ex­pe­ri­enced.

She al­so raised con­cerns over the avail­abil­i­ty of equip­ment and ap­pa­ra­tus re­quired for dai­ly du­ties in clin­ics, claim­ing that nurs­es of­ten had to search for ba­sic in­stru­ments need­ed.

“We func­tion with­out med­i­cine, with­out equip­ment, we have to walk the hos­pi­tal to get med­ica­tion for a ward, you work­ing here and you have to go and bor­row from some­where else be­cause you don’t have.

“The pa­tients suf­fer­ing is not the fault of the nurse be­cause we are not re­spon­si­ble for stock­ing the hos­pi­tal with ad­e­quate sup­plies.”

At­tempts to con­tact Health Min­is­ter Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe via cell­phone and What­sApp were made sev­er­al times on Tues­day, but no re­sponse was re­ceived.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to Gopeesingh but was told that he was prepar­ing to en­ter the op­er­at­ing the­atre and was un­able to speak at that time.

Mean­while, the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer, Dr Daryl Din­di­al, when asked yes­ter­day about the over­time rates for nurs­es, ex­plained that his of­fice played no part in alert­ing of­fi­cials about the pay­ment.

“In 2023, the po­si­tion was that we were go­ing to main­tain the ex­ist­ing rates as they were. So there are three cat­e­gories of nurs­es, I re­call, who are in re­ceipt of a rate of $75, it’s in­ten­sive care, men­tal health, and...one group in To­ba­go. And every­body else was $60.

“What was asked of us was to ex­tend all the rates to $75 and to ex­tend to oth­er cat­e­gories. That was not agreed up­on be­cause there’s a rea­son why there’s a dif­fer­ence in rates. Those who re­ceive the high­er rate do more com­plex work as op­posed to the oth­er ar­eas.

“So we weren’t aware of what was hap­pen­ing in terms of the gov­er­nance process­es. No, we were re­quest­ed to con­sid­er in­creas­ing and ex­pand­ing.”