Is Georgetown Public Hospital CORPORATION public service?

Oct 07, 2020 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

Precedent to the registration by the then Minister of Health, of the Georgetown Public Hospital as the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation, there was a substantial consultancy project conducted by an international team, the objective of which was to convert the health services into six regional administrations within the Public Service.
This re-organisational initiative was to be complemented by the Georgetown Public Hospital being extricated from the Public Service, and transformed into a semi-autonomous corporate agency (comparable to say GGMC, GWI and others). Appropriately, therefore it was registered as the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation, an event that should be easily verifiable.
However, there were two foot-faults in the decision-making process regarding the achievement as the consultancy’s objective. The first one was that only one Regional Health Administration was established in Berbice; the other was that despite its new corporate status and the installation of a Board intended to be of Executive Management of the GPHC, as recommended by the Consultants, the latter continued to report directly to the Ministry of Health. The results over the years have been as follows:
i) The Board of the Corporation has continued to be accountable to the Ministry in the same manner as a regular public service agency.

ii) The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation is the only agency of its kind included in the annual National Estimates as normal Public Service.
The apparent organisational inconsistency has been raised publicly by the undersigned on several previous occasions. Again, the current imbroglio between the Government and the Public Service Union raises a fundamental question of the legal status of the GPHC, and consequently whether its employees can legitimately be regarded as ‘Public Servants’ (Incidentally, when did the ‘Nurses Association’ disappear? And when was a Collective Agreement settled between the Board of the GPHC, and the Public Service Union?).
Now there is the opportunity to address this industrial relationship as comprehensively as possible. Not unrelated is the faux pas committed by the constitutional Guyana Revenue Authority in recently recognising the “Public Service Union”, when in fact the former is not legally ‘Public Service’.
En passant one presumes that what ‘collective agreement’ exists makes the usual provisions for
i) Conciliation
ii) Arbitration
The parties now involved should therefore take appropriate note of this ¬– in this reckless pandemic environment.

E.B. John

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