The North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) has strong­ly con­demned state­ments made by the pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Na­tion­al Nurs­es’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTNNA), dis­miss­ing claims re­gard­ing its nurs­ing staff shift arrange­ments as false and mis­lead­ing. In a state­ment re­leased on Wednes­day, the NCRHA de­nied as­ser­tions that nurs­es were as­signed to work four-hour shifts or suf­fered fi­nan­cial dis­ad­van­tages.

The au­thor­i­ty clar­i­fied that it op­er­ates un­der a two-shift sys­tem con­sist­ing of eight-hour and 12-hour shifts, and has not in­tro­duced any four-hour shift struc­ture. Ac­cord­ing to the au­thor­i­ty, the con­tro­ver­sy stems from a flex­i­ble arrange­ment in­tro­duced by the Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of Nurs­ing to ac­com­mo­date a small group of staff mem­bers fac­ing health, per­son­al, or trans­porta­tion dif­fi­cul­ties.

This ini­tia­tive ap­plied to rough­ly three per­cent of the au­thor­i­ty’s work­force of more than 1,000 nurs­es. The NCRHA stat­ed that the arrange­ment was in­tend­ed to help these nurs­es com­plete their re­quired 40-hour work week, with most con­tin­u­ing to work eight-hour shifts while the re­main­ing four hours were han­dled through ex­ist­ing pool arrange­ments.