Increased maternity leave being hindered by NIS Act

Jan 25, 2017 News

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…but Ministry still working to have six months leave legalised

Exclusive breastfeeding lasting for as much as six months of a newborn’s life has long been

recommended and embraced by health sectors around the world. However, this reality is not always possible, since many mothers who are career women here in Guyana are only legally eligible for three months of maternity leave.
This, by extension, means that these women must return to work and make alternative provisions for their babies. Making use of breast pumps to ensure babies use breast milk even when their mothers are away during the day is sometimes an alternative, but according to health officials, the breastfeeding process is in fact one that is expected to forge a unique bond between mother and baby.
The local Ministry of Public Health has long been advocating for an increase in maternity leave. In fact, health officials recently disclosed that the Ministry has been gaining the support in its quest to achieve this goal. The Ministry of Social Protection has been among the major supporters of this endeavour which, after many years of being proposed, is still in its initial stage.
This, according to Minister within the Ministry of Public Health, Dr. Karen Cummings, is due to the fact that there are a great deal of measures that must be put in place before mothers can benefit from six months of maternity leave.
“Even though we have the go-ahead from some stakeholders and sectors, the current three months leave is in adherence with the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) Act, and we will have to re-adjust that before any change can take place,” Minister Cummings asserted.
“So we will have to keep working with that before we can extend three months to six months…it is not easy, but it is on the drawing board,” she noted.
In the Ministry’s quest to promote and legalise six months of maternity leave, Dr. Cummings said that efforts will shortly be made to convene a stakeholders’ meeting to further advance the process.
During earlier comments on the subject, Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Dr. Shamdeo Persaud, had stressed the need for social policies that could support the six-month maternity leave notion. He had linked it to primary health care and pointed out that while the general delivery of health care is a mandate of the health sector, primary health care is one that requires full involvement

of respective communities.
He had highlighted the need for primary health care services to be offered at a cost that communities are able to bear and underscored that “it is not things people cannot achieve or cannot afford to have access to, and it is usually developed in the spirit of self-reliance and self determination”.
The involvement of communities, he said, is crucial to assess what people’s needs are from their perspective.
“It focuses health beyond traditional hospital care. It is more towards health equity and production of healthy social policies,” Dr. Persaud had asserted as he pointed out, “we are not only talking about Government policies and so on, but social policies – the way we behave among each other, the support men give to their wives or other pregnant women in society”.
This, according to Dr. Persaud, can also translate to the amount of leave afforded women after they would have delivered their babies.
”We are still tied with this three months NIS requirement, and if you look carefully at the law it is really one month of confinement, and then two months after the mother has gotten her baby, so how is this woman breastfeeding this baby for six months?” questioned Dr. Persaud.
The CMO in his deliberation emphasised that breastfeeding is seen as one of the tactics that can serve to combat obesity in babies. Moreover, he stressed the need for the implementation of social policies to address this health challenge.
A few years earlier, the CMO had told this publication of discussions which were leaning towards the possibility of having mothers in the CARICOM Region be eligible for six months of maternity leave to ensure newborn babies are exclusively breastfed. This approach, he related, was designed to tackle childhood obesity.
According to the CMO, childhood obesity starts in the womb, depending on the kind of nutrition mothers take and the extent to which they maintain health. He insisted that not only is breastfeeding important to the wellbeing of babies, but they are less likely to be hooked on sugar or high calorie foods.
”Sugar and salt are acquired tastes. If you don’t expose them to sugar they like what you give them and they grow up like that. Breastfeeding transitioning into complementary feeding is a much more acceptable way of controlling children’s weight,” he said.
Dr. Persaud had, moreover, lamented that the three months maternity leave contradicts the six-month exclusive breastfeeding that is promoted by the local Health Ministry.
”This was one of the things that came up…how we could start stimulating Governments to open the discussion about our mothers. We can’t have mothers going back to work in three months, and we are insisting on, and think there is a value of breastfeeding for six months; so the two things do not coincide,” he stressed.
Dr. Persaud however noted that while the Ministry will have to advocate for the six-month leave “there could be some economic costs, since Guyana is still a growing society. Taking into consideration that many women may not have formal employment contracts, Government may have to prepare social security programmes,” he added.
”Those are some of the things we want to get into. If we have cross-regional policies, Governments are more likely to comply. And countries must have standards,” Dr. Persaud noted. But although this process should have been set in motion about two years ago, the Ministry is in 2017 still initialising its advocacy in this regard.
In addition to the first six months of exclusive breastfeeding, it is also recommended that breastfeeding continues, with appropriate complementary foods, up to two years of age or even beyond.

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