Govt begins recruitment of nurses amid ongoing protests

JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

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The man­age­ment of the North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA), which is re­spon­si­ble for the ad­min­is­tra­tion of the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex (EWM­SC) in Mt Hope, has be­gun hir­ing new nurs­es to help al­le­vi­ate some of the staffing is­sues caused by sick­out ac­tion from nurs­es cur­rent­ly in the sys­tem.

Guardian Me­dia spoke with some of the 50 new nurs­es who had ori­en­ta­tion at the fa­cil­i­ty yes­ter­day, but many of them said they did not want to speak much on the is­sue. They not­ed, how­ev­er, that they were the sec­ond batch of nurs­es go­ing through the ori­en­ta­tion process this week.

Oth­er health­care staff said while the sit­u­a­tion at the hos­pi­tal was bet­ter than it was on the week­end, when the sick­out ac­tion was ini­ti­at­ed, there still re­mains an is­sue with nurs­es not show­ing up for work. One med­ical staff said pa­tients on wards where nurs­es did not show up for du­ty were be­ing trans­ferred to oth­er wards with nurs­es to man­age the sit­u­a­tion.

Guardian Me­dia was told both nurs­es and en­rolled nurs­ing as­sis­tants (ENA) were call­ing in sick, leav­ing on­ly the pa­tient care as­sis­tants to man the wards.

Most pa­tients who ar­rived at the Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency De­part­ment with ma­jor health is­sues were not placed on wards. This re­sult­ed in in­terns be­ing used to fill the gap, forc­ing them to work dou­ble and some­times triple shifts.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands in­terns re­ceived an email yes­ter­day, in­form­ing them of longer work­ing hours, from eight-hour shifts to 24-hour shifts.

The email read: “Please be ad­vised that ef­fec­tive April 1 to April 12; all calls are now 24 hours. This is a di­rec­tive by the Head of De­part­ment. This has be­come nec­es­sary due to nurs­es’ im­passe.”

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Trinidad and To­ba­go Na­tion­al Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Idi Stu­art said the new nurs­es would still not be enough to ad­dress the over­all short­fall at the hos­pi­tal. He said of the 50 or so nurs­es hired, it is a far cry from the num­ber of nurs­es need­ed at the NCRHA.

“That is a mere drop in the buck­et re­al­ly and tru­ly. We don’t have the ex­act num­bers be­cause it’s still on­go­ing, but if they were to hire 25 out of those 50 nurs­es, that is not even enough to fill the va­can­cies that ex­ist with­in one of the de­part­ments at Er­ic Williams, which is the Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency De­part­ment. That would not even fill the void that cur­rent­ly ex­ists.”

Nurs­es yes­ter­day told Guardian Me­dia that there were ru­mours that the ex­ec­u­tive planned on fil­ing an in­junc­tion to com­pel nurs­es to re­turn to work, as they are es­sen­tial work­ers. Asked about that, Stu­art said the as­so­ci­a­tion had al­so heard the ru­mours but was un­able to con­firm it.

How­ev­er, for­mer health min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan says that may not be the best move. He said if he was health min­is­ter, he’d seek a meet­ing with the TTNNA.

“I would have thought that ne­go­ti­a­tions and meet­ings would have tak­en place and the min­is­ter would have stepped in and sort of ba­si­cal­ly as­sist the chair­man in de­vel­op­ing a plan and a strat­e­gy for the nurs­es to go back to work. Be­cause they had a re­mu­ner­a­tion and con­sid­er­a­tion go­ing for five years, start­ed dur­ing COVID and con­tin­ued. Per­son­al­ly, I would have liked to han­dle it dif­fer­ent­ly by chang­ing the method of the pool rather than just re­mov­ing mon­ey from peo­ple’s con­sid­er­a­tion.”

He added: “When some­body is en­joy­ing ben­e­fits for five years or more, you have to tread care­ful­ly. If you want to re­move it and have meet­ings and have ne­go­ti­a­tions. Bring­ing down an in­junc­tion is like a big stick and all you’re go­ing to get is, you’re not go­ing to get good­will, you’re go­ing to get bad will, and it’s go­ing to cre­ate an un­nec­es­sary pull and tug.”

Guardian Me­dia called and mes­saged NCRHA chair­man Dr Tim Gopeesingh, Health Min­is­ter Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe and Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Health Dr Rishad Seecher­an but none of them re­spond­ed up to press time.

Mean­while, Len Sal­vary, whose daugh­ter has been at the hos­pi­tal for days now wait­ing to be ad­mit­ted to a ward, yes­ter­day said he was con­tem­plat­ing trans­fer­ring his daugh­ter to the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal.

“When I went there yes­ter­day (Tues­day), it was a lit­tle much bet­ter than over the week­end. But this morn­ing I went back, the place start to crowd again. It have the doc­tors who try­ing their best. There are some doc­tors, they’re try­ing their best be­cause it have no nurse.”

He lament­ed that the Health Min­istry gets one of the high­est bud­get­ed al­lo­ca­tions, get­ting $8.214 bil­lion, the sec­ond largest al­lo­ca­tion and an im­prove­ment of $643 mil­lion com­pared to the last bud­get.

How­ev­er, Sal­vary added that the ac­tion tak­en by nurs­es “for their own mon­ey” is a tes­ta­ment to how “bad things are in the coun­try.”