Rishard Khan and

Bavi­ta Gopaulchan

Pres­i­dent of the T&T Reg­is­tered Nurs­es’ As­so­ci­a­tion Idi Stu­art yes­ter­day warned that hos­pi­tals around the coun­try could be­come ghost towns if Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh does not at­tend to nurs­es’ con­cerns.

He said health work­ers, who are on the front­lines of T&T’s fight against COVID-19, were up­set at an an­nounce­ment on Wednes­day that mil­lions of dol­lars will be spent on stipends for teach­ers to pre­pare stu­dents for the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment.

“We can­not un­der­stand af­ter we would have been the front of the front­lin­ers be­ing used to tack­le this COVID re­sponse; how our gov­ern­ment would not see it fit to recog­nise tan­gi­bly the ef­forts of nurs­es and mid­wives in this COVID-19 re­sponse,” Stu­art said

While in­sist­ing that there is no an­i­mos­i­ty be­tween nurs­es and teach­ers, the health work­ers felt it was “to­tal dis­re­spect” and “the most hurt­ful thing that has hap­pened to the nurs­ing pro­fes­sion in quite a while,” and that mon­ey was found to of­fer ex­tra com­pen­sa­tion to work­ers in an­oth­er area of the pub­lic sec­tor.

Stu­art said nurs­es and mid­wives have been hold­ing back their frus­tra­tions for well over a year and are now at break­ing point. He said the of­fer of the stipend to SEA teach­ers as ev­i­dence that there is mon­ey in the coun­try, just not for nurs­es and mid­wives.

Stu­art said the as­so­ci­a­tion will be vis­it­ing the Min­istry of Health to­day to seek a meet­ing with De­laysingh to re­solve the mat­ter.

He warned that if their pro­pos­al is not ac­cept­ed mem­bers have al­ready been placed on no­tice that from Ju­ly 1. “We ex­pect that a na­tion­al hol­i­day would be de­clared for all nurs­es and mid­wives in T&T.”

Stu­art fur­ther warned that this will be “the be­gin­ning of some­thing more” as there will be a strate­gic with­draw­ing of nurs­es who have been go­ing be­yond the call of du­ty in key ar­eas.

From Tues­day and every Tues­day go­ing for­ward, we’ll be no­ti­fy­ing nurs­es, “with­draw your ser­vices in these par­tic­u­lar ar­eas be­cause this is not your job spec,” he said.

Stu­art said nurs­es have been per­form­ing mul­ti­ple func­tions as re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties have not been fill­ing va­can­cies, even tak­ing up roles as clean­ers and lab at­ten­dants.

The as­so­ci­a­tion rep­re­sents some 3,000 nurs­es but Stu­art es­ti­mates that “all 10,000 nurs­es and mid­wives in T&T is go­ing to be part of this ac­tion.”

He ad­mit­ted the health sys­tem will be dis­rupt­ed if nurs­es take ac­tion but said he “makes no apolo­gies be­cause we have stayed silent for too long.”

The as­so­ci­a­tion’s planned “hol­i­day” will come just days af­ter the coun­try is sched­uled to com­plete re­ceiv­ing al­most 1,000 na­tion­als from abroad. The Gov­ern­ment ex­pect that this re­turn­ing batch will in­clude pos­i­tive COVID-19 cas­es.