THE country's public sector dental surgeons are locked in battle with the Government over the administration's failure to implement staff changes agreed on four years ago.
The dental surgeons are still waiting for the promised appointment of regional dental surgeons to oversee the operations of the Government's dental staff in each of the four health regions as per a 2006-2008 Heads of Agreement. >.
Now, at the end of the latest round of wage talks (2008-2010), the surgeons are up in arms, arguing that not only has the Government not lived up to its end of the bargain, but keeps changing the agreed terms.
Fresh from a meeting yesterday with representatives of the Ministry of Finance, Dr Winston Grey, president of the Jamaica Association of Public Dental Surgeons, said there would be no early end to negotiations as he had hoped if this is not rectified.
He explained that the South East Regional Health Authority (SERHA) is the only one of the four regions that has a regional dental surgeon whose post was established as far back as 2004.
This post was to have been replicated in the remaining three health regions: North East, Southern and Western.
"We have not been able to have that implemented and they (Ministry of Health), originally tried to push forward a regional dental surgeon position in those other regions that were two grades below the one established for SERHA (South East Regional Health Authority). When we found out about it we had to object," said Dr Grey.
He explained that the Ministry of Health went back to the drawing board and redesigned the job description for the post without consultation with stakeholders. Dr Grey stopped just short of saying that the redesign was patronising to dental surgeons.
"Now they have a job description where they want the regional dental surgeon to report to the parish medical officer of health. But you can't have a regional dental health surgeon reporting to the parish level person. That is ridiculous ... in them establishing the other three dental surgeon positions, they have kind of tweaked the SERHA job description and we are objecting to it," said an adamant Dr Grey.
"Why is the medical officer of health supervising the dental team?" he asked.
This also has implications for wage talks.
"What we have been arguing for is for our basic salary to be on par with that of the physician, that's the main thing we have been asking for. Yes, it ends up as an increase (in pay) but we think that it's something that should be there long ago. For a long time we were negotiating for this."
He feels that given their years of education and specialised training, Grade One dental surgeons should be on par with at least the Grade Two physician.
At yesterday's meeting, another issue emerged to put a damper on the dental surgeons' hopes; the issue of their having private practice privileges. The ministry reportedly argued that this was unfair, given that medical officers don't get those privileges.
But Dr Grey said his colleagues are concerned that they still have to cover their assigned clinics during the same period of time when they are at private practice, without being paid an on-call allowance to cover those extra hours.
The dental surgeons complained that the other medical groups who have private practice privileges, don't lose money because of it.
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