The Tribune

By KEILE CAMPBELL

Tribune Staff Reporter

kcampbell@tribunemedia.net

DESPITE the government’s repeated assurances that negotiations with doctors are progressing, the Consultant Physicians Staff Association (CPSA) is still waiting for officials to follow through.

The government had initially set a goal to finalise a new industrial agreement with doctors by February 2025. However, Minister of Health Dr Michael Darville confirmed on March 12, 2025, that negotiations remain ongoing, particularly concerning junior doctors.

Minister of Labour Pia Glover-Rolle acknowledged that the process has been slowed by scheduling conflicts, including travel commitments and ongoing budget debates.

“Yes, we are still hopeful that we will bring this matter of the doctors’ signing to conclusion in short order, schedules being as they were,” she recently told The Tribune. “We did have an initial negotiation meeting, and then there was — stakeholders had to — on all sides had to travel, and there were scheduling issues, and now we are, as a government, hoping to draft a proposal, a new proposal, that will be presented to the doctors’ unions.”

While the government has not provided a firm deadline, she indicated that the revised proposal should be presented to the unions within March 2025, with the hope of resolving the final sticking points.

She emphasised that while the government wants to conclude negotiations as soon as possible, certain complex matters require time.

While the government insists it is making progress, CPSA President Dr Charelle Lockhart says doctors have been waiting for weeks, with little communication and even fewer concrete actions.

“I am not holding my breath,” she said yesterday. “Put it that way. And I don’t hold my breath. I become a little bit more, I shouldn’t say patient, because I’m not patient with it. I’m just allowing it not to raise my blood pressure and not like holding on to their promised words, because it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

The union says it was supposed to receive a draft proposal on February 21, but the government cancelled the meeting. A new deadline of February 26 was set, yet two weeks later, no document has been presented.

Dr Lockhart said she has been the one repeatedly following up with officials, only to receive vague and unconvincing responses.

She said the entire matter could be resolved in a single day if the government took the process seriously.

“I’ve given them loads of options, including, you know, we have one major stalling issue, and I told them, since they didn’t bring it up at the beginning of our negotiations, then they should leave it out of this contract and allow us to sign the contracts without that clause, and then we can continue to negotiate on that one thing,” she said. “But in the meantime, my membership was suffering because, you know, we have an agreement that we could sign.”

The main issue causing delays, she said, is the government’s insistence on a time and attendance clause that would require senior doctors to clock in and out.

“It’s not practical for us,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for us the way we work. It doesn’t make sense. Our work is not solely done in the four walls of any institution. A lot of our work is providing oversight and expertise at all hours of the day and night, in and out of the institutions, and they have no way to capture what we’re doing outside of the institution, so they should not be demanding to know how much time we’re spending in the institution. It just doesn’t make any sense. We’re not like shift hourly workers.”

Dr Lockhart noted that junior doctors, who operate on a fixed-hour system, have a different perspective on the clause.

“They work differently than us, so they work 40 hours. They’re expected to be there for 40 hours, but they work so much more than that.”

Despite the delays, Dr Lockhart said the CPSA has already made significant compromises to speed up negotiations.

“We’ve given a lot up — a lot of what we initially asked for in the beginning of our negotiations,” she said. “And so at this particular time, we have pretty much agreed on how they would like to compensate us, base salary, financial wise, that way.”

She also pointed out the lack of health insurance for senior doctors as a major issue, calling it an embarrassment.

Dr Lockhart also revealed that the CPSA proposed non-cash alternatives to salary increases — such as tax breaks — but the government outright refused.

“We’ve asked them for non-financial things like, you know, tax breaks and things like that, and they have straight up said no, they don’t want to make that, you know, allow us to make that a precedent.”