Before you call on BERT ambulance, just ask yourself, is this really an emergency? The Ministry of Health is asking city residents to think about this before calling since BERT's management team has essentially terminated its partnership with the ministry, leaving the ministry with staff, resources and other equipment they now have to manage and be solely responsible for. It's an extra burden for Health officials and today Director of Health Services Dr. Marvin Manzanero detailed what caused this rupture in their partnership and what will have to be done moving forward.
Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
"The last note we got was perhaps the 2nd or 3rd week of August where they had suggested that they were going to discontinue that effective September 1st, given that they were requesting payment for land transfer from the government. Now BERT normally gets a monthly subvention of $18,000 plus every month. They were requesting further payment of almost every land transfer. On average it would amount to government paying them about $40,000 - $43,000 every month. So they have started a billing process for us in May, June, July. We had had a negotiation table with them to see what was the mechanism? because it's not something that's factored into our budget. When we got another alert on August 17th I think it was, we had said we have a proposal and this is where we want to go. I met with Ms. Burke and two of our staff members on Monday, we left a proposal with them. The proposal is basically to keep the subvention and that the government would pay for their 9am that they currently have and the couple of other staff. We thought we had an agreement or at least I did when I left the office on Monday. We sent out further information electronically yesterday, but it seems that based on the note they sent me earlier today that that is not satisfactory to them and that they will pull out."
"Basically what this means is if they pulled out, tomorrow we have to some level of responsibility. It's not that clear to me what we get from them. My understanding the ambulances and medical equipment and some other things come over to the Ministry of Health, because we kind of have to take it over. I think going forward what we will do is negotiate with the staff to see if we can keep them at what salary. Mind you the negotiation process we had with them is that we are actually going to hike up everybody salary, because we are going to put them on pay scale 10. So that means that the 9am, would have gotten a salary increase, just by virtue of, we paying them now. So we would have to look at that situation and I guess tomorrow see what we start doing with the staff that we have."
"We had discuss with BERT our situation in terms with is transferred, because we notice also that some people who don't really need an ambulance are the ones transferred from Cleopatra White to Karl Heusner in an ambulance, for example. Those things are going to have to be tweak out."
The Central Health Region will have to manage the BERT's 5 ambulances. The ministry will try to renegotiate the salary of the EMT's who are left without a job after this management pull out. A MEMBER OF BERT's Board declined comment today saying they are still negotiating.
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