Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

Health­care work­ers can ex­pect their cut of the $210 mil­lion ex-gra­tia pay­ment any day now, ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh. Speak­ing to the me­dia at the Men­tal Health Stig­ma Re­duc­tion Cam­paign launch on Wednes­day at the Na­tion­al Li­brary and In­for­ma­tion Sys­tem Au­thor­i­ty, he said,

“[The work­ers will re­ceive it] very, very short­ly. All the pro­cess­ing is be­ing done as we speak."

Around 20,000 health­care work­ers are ex­pect­ed to re­ceive this pay­ment, as ini­tial­ly promised by Prime Min­is­ter Dr. Kei­th Row­ley in Au­gust 2022 and al­lo­cat­ed in the 2023 Bud­get. This pay­ment is sup­posed to be the gov­ern­ment’s way of re­pay­ing them for their hard work dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

Short­ly af­ter the PM’s an­nounce­ment, Deyals­ingh promised to work close­ly with the fi­nance min­is­ter to work out the de­tails.

Be­sides the $6.892 bil­lion al­lo­ca­tion for the health sec­tor in the bud­get, Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Colm Im­bert, an­nounced at his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion that the $210 mil­lion would be set aside for health­care work­ers. In Oc­to­ber, dur­ing the bud­get de­bate, Im­bert said the pay­ment would be made in cash in the month of No­vem­ber.

It is still un­clear how much each em­ploy­ee will re­ceive, how­ev­er, in Sep­tem­ber, T&T Reg­is­tered Nurs­es’ As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Idi Stu­art ex­pressed his opin­ion that some health work­ers should be com­pen­sat­ed more than oth­ers since clin­i­cal and nurs­ing staff were with pa­tients 24/7. Stu­art had said that each per­son­nel’s ex-gra­tia pay­ment should align with their salary.

There were al­so con­cerns over re­ceiv­ing the mon­ey in a time­ly man­ner, as they be­lieved it was long over­due. He added that the in­crease in food and gas prices was an in­creased ex­pense for the work­ers.