Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Health Min­is­ter Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe has as­sured that staff short­ages at the na­tion’s Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties (RHAs) will soon be ad­dressed.

In a What­sApp re­sponse to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Bo­doe said: “The Min­istry of Health ac­knowl­edges that the nurse-to-pa­tient ra­tio at some health fa­cil­i­ties needs to be im­proved. In recog­ni­tion of this and aris­ing from the 2026 Bud­get, the min­istry will re­ceive fund­ing to ad­dress op­er­a­tional gaps across the RHAs, which in­cludes the re­cruit­ment of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400 ad­di­tion­al nurs­es to strength­en front­line care.”

He added that the min­istry is con­duct­ing a hu­man re­source as­sess­ment across all RHAs to de­ter­mine the staffing and tech­ni­cal ca­pa­bil­i­ties re­quired.

“The Health Min­istry re­mains firm­ly com­mit­ted to en­sur­ing the needs of both pa­tients and health­care work­ers are met through im­proved staffing, bet­ter re­source al­lo­ca­tion, and on­go­ing health sys­tem re­form,” Bo­doe said.

The an­nounce­ment comes af­ter the T&T Na­tion­al Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion (TTNNA) staged a protest out­side the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex (EWM­SC) on Fri­day, call­ing for a bet­ter staff-to-pa­tient ra­tio.

TTNNA pres­i­dent Idi Stu­art wel­comed the pro­posed hires but ques­tioned why on­ly 400 nurs­es were men­tioned, when Bo­doe had pre­vi­ous­ly cit­ed a short­age of around 1,600 staff.

“That will trou­ble the as­so­ci­a­tion be­cause the min­is­ter him­self in­di­cat­ed that the pub­lic health sec­tor was short of 1,600-plus per­sons. We look for­ward to time­ly hires, as there are many nurs­ing grad­u­ates cur­rent­ly un­em­ployed de­spite short­ages,” Stu­art said.

He ex­plained that staffing lev­els at EWM­SC give a false im­pres­sion of suf­fi­cien­cy be­cause the Min­istry has not in­creased the staff es­tab­lish­ment in line with ex­pand­ed ser­vices, pre­vent­ing RHAs from fill­ing per­ma­nent po­si­tions.

The nurs­es’ protest came two days af­ter a meet­ing with the North Cen­tral RHA (NCRHA) board, dur­ing which Stu­art said the as­so­ci­a­tion sought an ad­e­quate num­ber of nurs­es per ward—a re­quest that was not agreed up­on.

Stu­art crit­i­cised NCRHA’s claim that one nurse per ward is suf­fi­cient, say­ing, “Their best ide­al is two nurs­es per ward, two reg­is­tered nurs­es, and that can­not be.”

The protest fol­lowed a pub­lic ex­change be­tween NCRHA chair­man Dr Tim Gopeesingh and Stu­art. Gopeesingh dis­missed con­cerns of a se­vere short­age, stat­ing that all 893 nurs­ing po­si­tions are filled and in­ter­na­tion­al nurse-to-pa­tient stan­dards are be­ing met. Stu­art coun­tered, say­ing the as­so­ci­a­tion has re­peat­ed­ly raised these is­sues and called for greater pro­fes­sion­al­ism from man­age­ment.