Patients experienced delays at several departments of the San Fernando General Hospital, yesterday, as staff from the Medical Records Department stayed off duty.
The workers are responsible for filing and sorting medical records as well as updating patient notes, building medical trace cards and sending records to the various departments of the hospital.
The administrative workers are now calling on Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh to address under-staffing, worker victimisation and deplorable working conditions.
During an interview, a spokesman for the group said there were 94 health records personnel throughout the South West Regional Health Authority (SWRHA) but only six of them were stationed at the old hospital building.
"Ideally we need about ten members of staff but recently they pulled one of our staff members from the old hospital building to work at the San Fernando Teaching Hospital. We are overburdened with records because everything is done manually," the worker said. She explained that there were two filing stations at the old hospital and the teaching hospital.
"The filing room is cramped because they closed down the births and deaths office and put it in the records department. We have no air conditioning and there is barely room to walk. We have to eat lunch on top of the files." She said the issues were raised with senior hospital officials but nothing was done.
"Today we had no choice but to stay off the job because we are fed up. These senior managers at the hospital have poor management skills and every time we ask them to deal with the problems they say we have to follow directives," the worker said.
A representative of the Public Service Association who requested anonymity said the union sought a meeting yesterday with the managers but were denied. "They told us we can meet but not in the presence of the union. Some of us walked out," a worker said.
The union official said workers would return to work today but if there was no relief, they would have no choice but to take alternative action.
Hospital response
Contacted yesterday, chief executive officer of the SWRHA, Anil Gosine, said he was unaware of the workers' concerns.
"I am surprised because just yesterday I had a meeting with two managers but I was not informed about this problem," Gosine said. He said the SWRHA was currently engaged in talks with the Ministry of Health to hire between 15 and 20 workers for the Medical Records Department. Gosine also said that new computer software was currently being utilised to log patient records.
"We have a lot of archives and we are trying to computerise so there will not be this pile-up of manual records. We are trying to sort out how far back we should log. We are dealing with very old records and purging the ones where people may have died a long time ago," Gosine said.
He said that he would address the workers' concerns related to working conditions and hold a meeting with the two senior managers.