Nurses in the country reportedly staged a sick out on Thursday over unpaid overtime causing the Public Hospitals Authority (PHA) to implement contingency plans to ensure service continuity.
Bahamas Nurses Union President, Muriel Lightbourn spoke with ZNS News about latest round of unrest. She said, “I can’t really speak to whether it’s a definite sick out or if the nurses are sick.”
According to reports approximately 140 nurses called in sick impacting departments in the Princess Margaret Hospital including the Intensive Care Unit. Lightbourn said, “we don’t need one nurse out of an area especially a critical area. It’s a big deficiency and you don’t want that to happen. So could you imagine if you have more than one nurse calling out. You have six, seven nurses in one department calling out that’s crippling especially if its gonna be our critical area like Accident and Emergency, somewhere like that we can’t afford that.”
The PHA informed staff in a memo that the overtime budget had been exhausted and that overtime would only by processed with the approval of PHA Manager Director, Aubynette Rolle.
According to the nurses union president supplementary funding was being sought by the PHA. “When you have people feeling disrespected anything could happen, anything could happen and that is something that we need to improve especially in our country.”
Lightbourn continued saying, “if people are understanding, believing that they’re not gonna be paid for the overtime I don’t know how you will call somebody else to ask them to come in.”
Office of the Prime Minister Press Secretary, Keishla Adderley was asked for comment on the issue at a press briefing on Thursday. She said, “an assessment is underway today to try and determine the extent of the problem and make sure that coverage is in place when needed and they it’s prioritized as is the case in emergency situations and scenarios like these. In the meantime we are very hopeful to speak with the relevant unions, stakeholders to get a handle on the problem to speak about the situation and to come to a resolution so that the public health system can return to full strength.”
Later in the day PHA officials released a statement on the issue providing an update on service continuity.
