BHCS, Brown-Darrell Clinic To Reduce Salaries
Bermuda HealthCare Services and Brown-Darrell Clinic announced today that they have implemented salary decreases that will be effective in the very near future, adding that “from top to bottom, the entire team will experience pay cuts.”
This step has been taken because of what Executive Chair Dr. Ewart Brown calls “callous, irrational and illegal reductions in payments for MRI’s and CT scans.”
Dr. Brown mentioned Bermuda Health Council CEO Tawanna Wedderburn, as well as Health Council Board Chair Simone Barton and Finance Chair Andrew Simons, and noted that the latter two are OBA candidates in the upcoming election.
“What you see here are the raw elements of a political vendetta,” he said, adding that they reduced the reimbursement rates “with the direct intent to destroy my business.”
Dr Brown said, “We will fight this just as we are resisting the wider effort of destruction being employed by the OBA. We have over 20 employees, most of whom are Bermudians, and we intend to fight relentlessly to keep them employed so they we can continue to serve our patients.
“BHCS has been in existence since 1990 and is the only facility outside of KEMH that performs MRIs. Brown-Darrell has been open for the past 9 years and is the only facility outside of KEMH that performs CT scans.
“In the past, both of these clinics have served as back-up facilities when KEMH’s machines have been down. It is critical to the health of all Bermudians that we have operational diagnostic equipment in the event that KEMH’s is not operational.
“Clearly, the OBA government through BHeC did not think of this, or simply were so distracted by their ruthless and never-ending attacks on me that they paid no regard to the wider implications for our majority Bermudian staff or our Bermudian patients,” Dr Brown said.
