.png)
JMDA First Vice President Dr. Jubilee Brown Service and JMDA President Dr. Renee Badroe
By Prince Moore
The Jamaica Medical Doctors' Association (JMDA) is hopeful that issues concerning the retroactive payments for junior doctors will be resolved during today's meeting with the Ministries of Finance and Health.
The meeting is set for 10:30 Tuesday morning at the Finance Ministry.
Junior doctors took industrial action on Monday, which affected operations at public health facilities across the island.
They resumed duties Monday evening following a mediation exercise involving the JMDA and Ministries of Health and Finance, facilitated by the Ministry of Labour.
The JMDA says the industrial action could have been avoided if the government responded to their concerns earlier.
Dr. Jubilee Brown Service, First Vice President of the Jamaica Medical Doctors' Association, said Tuesday's meeting should bear some results.
"We want to remain optimistic that we can somehow, as the negotiating parties, come to some neutral agreement. We're open. The JMDA is open. We're not saying we're not open, but so far those principles that I would have outlined have not been honoured, and that remains a big challenge for us. So I really hope that in our meetings going forward, that we can see some recognition of that and get some movement in the discussion," she said Monday evening on Radio Jamaica's Beyond the Headlines.
JMDA President Dr. Renee Badroe is adamant that the Finance Ministry is in violation of an agreement which should have been in effect from March last year.
"The basic salary was agreed upon, but there are other items that needed to be settled, and that settlement should have happened from March 31, 2023. So right now the outstanding items are emergency duty allowance and the retroactive payments. Whenever you change the basic salary of any institution, the overtime rates changed. So they changed the basic salary in 2023, but they did not change overtime. So the overtime we have been working is the same rate we have had from 2021," she explained.
She was also a guest Monday on Beyond the Headlines.
comments powered by Disqus
All feeds
