CPSA: We’re Being Tossed Around Like A Hot Potato

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NASSAU, BAHAMAS – Four months after the Consultant Physician Staff Association pulled its services over an outstanding industrial agreement, the Union of Senior Doctors says they remain in limbo without a signed industrial agreement or even a proposal.

Union President Dr. Charelle Lockhart says that in their March 28th quarterly meeting, Labour and the Public Service Minister Pia Glover-Rolle said that the government would issue a proposal on April 1st.

Dr. Lockhart says the union eventually received a proposal which she says was exactly identical to the one that was rejected.

According to Dr. Lockhart, the government and the Public Hospital’s Authority are playing the blame game.

“The government says they have been explicit in what they want to propose to us, and the Public Hospitals Authority say they have not gotten the green light to send us the proposal, but the proposal that was sent…we ended up rejecting. The government said they had no dealings with that, [and] that’s not what the discussion was,” Lockhart says.

The CPSA says it has been faced with this issue since 2022.

The group is pushing for two main points, the first is an agreement to provide senior doctors with health insurance and to outline how the premiums will be paid. The second issue is a suitable way to capture the number of hours worked.

“They want [us] to put in a time and attendance clause when they have no way to capture our time and attendance, and I continue to tell people that my job does not end when I walk out of the doors of the Princess Margaret Hospital…[as] I am consulting all hours of the day and night with people on the family islands, to the outside community clinics,” Lockhart says.

As for what they’re prepared to do to get results, Dr. Lockhart says,

“It seems as though the government only understands industrial unrest, they don’t understand the kind of calm [to]…have a conversation, [to] negotiate in good faith, they don’t seem to understand that.”

“We are still holding our strike certificate, [and] that is our absolute last resit…at this particular point in time. If that’s what our members say we are to do, then I am not going to be the one to discourage that,” she says.