Ministry urges regional bodies to pay over salary deductions

The Ministry of Health and Wellness (MOHW) has issued a stern warning to regional bodies to ensure staff’s personal salary deductions are remitted expeditiously.

The instruction was issued in a meeting held last week even as the MOHW also committed to pay out some $200 million in gratuity payments owed to junior medical doctors for some time now by the regional health authorities.

“The honourable minister has put a stop to that,” Jamaica Medical Doctors’ Association (JMDA) President Mindi Fitz-Henley told The Gleaner, noting that the heads of the regional health authorities were instructed to ensure the protracted delivery of personal salary deductions taken from its employees to financial entities “does not continue”.

The meeting was attended by junior doctors represented by the South East Regional Health Authority (SEHRA), the North East Regional Health Authority (NEHRA) and the JMDA.

Recently, the JMDA, as well as the Nurses Association of Jamaica, raised concerns over the late payment of monies deducted from their salaries by SEHRA to entities to which they had financial obligations.

The Gleaner has also confirmed that medical professionals of the Western Regional Health Authority (WHRA) were also affected by late payments of their deductions, but that the payments “have been brought up to date,” former head of the WHRA, Errol Greene, told The Gleaner.

Greene is now the regional director of SEHRA, replacing Maureen Golding. His former post at the WHRA is now headed by St Andrade Sinclair, former chief executive officer of the May Pen Hospital.

The situation for WHRA was “like everybody else,” Greene said, noting that the WHRA’s challenge was “just the deductions”.

The issue resulted in some health workers complaining that they were in danger of being labelled as bad debtors, as their car loans and other payments had been outstanding for months.

In an April 9 memo, SERHA’s director of finance advised employees that the funds had not been paid due to financial constraints.

PAST SIMILAR SITUATIONS

The regional health authorities, particularly SEHRA, have, in the past, navigated similar situations regarding late payments. However, this most recent episode seems to have been compounded by the unprecedented demands on healthcare workers wrought by the current global pandemic as, the regional heads contend, more staff had to be hired to handle the wave of COVID-19 cases as Jamaica’s case count surged over the last few months.

But Mindi Fitz-Henley said its doctors have been appeased, as “the backlog of pending deductions has also been cleared”.

“If there is an issue, in that they don’t have the money to pay salaries, they will have to sort that out separately,” she said.

The bill for the $200 million in gratuity payments due to the doctors will also have to be taken over by the MoHW, the permanent secretary in the ministry, Dunstan Bryan, said, citing the failure of the regional bodies to also meet this long-standing obligation.

“The ministry will resolve [the matter of] the gratuities owed. But it’s not us [the ministry] that owe this money, it’s the regions. But because the regions have not paid it, and it’s becoming an industrial relations issue, the ministry is going to intervene,” he said.

For his part, Chairman of SEHRA Wentworth Charles, speaking with The Gleaner a week ago, said the regional authority found itself in the ire of its employees because “there are times when the funds remitted to us fall short of our actual budget and there are times when there are delays [in remitting the payments] to us”.

“We get our budget from the ministries of health and finance, and if the ministry itself doesn’t give us the money on time, all the regional authorities will have financial difficulties,” he said.

Bryan, however, steered clear of the matter about whether the regions or the ministry is to be blamed for the delayed payment of employees’ personal salary deductions, saying only that “this is a matter to be put to the regions”.