By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

Senior doctors in the public healthcare system are hoping progress will now be made in concluding their own industrial agreement after their junior counterparts received their deal.

Dr Charelle Lockhart, the Consultant Physicians Staff Association (CPSA) president, said that following the industrial agreement signing between the Public Hospitals Authority (PHA) and the Bahamas Doctors Union Union (BDU), its planned Friday meeting with the Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) operator was cancelled “due to lack of details” and no new date has been provided.

“I am so pleased that our junior colleagues were able to get to the finish line yesterday and get their agreement inked,” Dr Lockhart said. “Our meeting was cancelled yesterday, unfortunately, due to lack of details/information. With this new industrial agreement proposal, we don’t have a new meeting date as only some of our concerns were addressed.

“So they offered us health insurance with an 80/20 split (payment of the premium; employer/employee) based on a cap,” Dr Lockhart added. “We asked what I thought were reasonable questions. Which insurance company? What plan? What’s the cap?

“To date we have no answers, and so the meeting we had set was cancelled. Only one person knows the answers to those questions. It baffles my mind. There are multiple people on the PHA [and] government negotiation team. Why doesn’t everyone on the team have these answers?

“Our agreement will also be retroactive with incremental increases in salary. How and when will those retroactive payments be made? I will say the PHA representatives have been working diligently in the last week to get this to the finish line. However, we are still waiting for the finance team to clarify these simple questions.”

With ‘clocking in’ to work by doctors one of the major issues for the unions, Dr Keva Thompson, the PHA’s deputy director, said at the BDU signing that the new Oracle system will help solve a lot of these concerns.

Dr Lockhart has been vocal in advocating for a system in which ‘clocking in’ does not involve being within the four walls of an institution given that sometimes services are provided elsewhere. She told Tribune Business:  “Oracle is a wait and see. It is a tool that can be customised to many different categories of staff and situations.

“It has fantastic features that will assist us with communication with human resources. It will certainly be useful in the future.” Dr Lockhart also sought to clarify remarks by Pia Glover-Rolle, minister of labour and the public service, at the BDU signing where she was referred to when discussing the union’s signing and its negotiations.

“I wanted to make a few clarifications as Pia Glover-Rolle mentioned my name on one of her interviews, which confused the public and my membership,” said Dr Lockhart. “I’m assuming she misspoke based on the clip I saw and that she was referring to Dr Glinton, the BDU president.”