HEALTH Minister Rudyard Spencer took a belated swipe at Nurses’ Association of Jamaica (NAJ) President Edith Allwood-Anderson for her ‘in-your-face’ confrontation with Prime Minister Bruce Golding outside Parliament recently.

Spencer suggested that what the NAJ head did was “crudity and vulgarity” mistaken for “advocacy, militancy and perseverance”.

Allwood-Anderson and her nurses waylaid Golding as he emerged from the Parliament building at Duke Street in downtown Kingston and quarrelled about the long delay in implementing their reclassification exercise. The embarrassing exchange was televised to the nation.

Spencer, who was also present, kept mostly quiet about the incident which raised questions about how to handle senior state employees, like Allwood-Anderson, who is head matron at the Kingston Public Hospital and at the same time president of the powerful NAJ.

His belated comment came in a letter responding to the Observer editorial of October 15, 2009 titled “The miseducation of the health ministry”, chastising Spencer and the Government’s mishandling of the issue.

Said Spencer: “Finally, we do agree with you that the image of the NAJ president ‘up in Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s face outside Parliament is to the lasting shame’ but not of those who, according to you, ‘dilly-dallied’ but rather of a country that mistakes crudity and vulgarity for advocacy, militancy and perseverance.”

The health minister said the editorial raised some pertinent points relating to the reclassification of jobs in the public health sector but demonstrated an “unfortunate misunderstanding” of some of the fundamental issues surrounding the matter.

He noted that the reclassification exercise involved four large groups in the health sector into which some 82 job titles were categorised, covering from chief executive officers and policy advisors to pharmacy technicians, ward assistants and drivers.

Spencer said the 2006-08 Heads of Agreement for nurses stipulated an implementation date as at July 1, 2007, which meant that whether the exercise was completed in 2009 or 2012, the effective date of implementation for the nursing group would be July 1, 2007.

“Public posturing may have given the public the perception that the nursing group was a priority when in fact the reclassification of the other groups had been taking place simultaneously,” he admitted.

“Secondly, the editorial sought to compare the health minister’s handling of the matter to that of his Cabinet colleague in the Ministry of Education. That is like comparing apples with bananas,” Spencer said in his letter.

“The latter is dealing with one bargaining unit compared to the more than 28 major professional groups in addition to several other groups such as pharmacy technicians, laboratory technicians and community health aides. There are no major complications in determining an implementation schedule, as there are no competing interests in education,” he added.