CHC nurses, lab staff may get pay hike in December

Some staff of the Commonwealth Health Center may have a merrier Christmas this year, with the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. administration looking at adjusting salaries around December.

According to CHCC chief executive officer Esther Muña, the move has already been discussed by the corporation board when it met several months ago.

“There are certain areas in the hospital side that hasn’t gotten a raise for a long time and that’s the laboratory and the nursing. Those are the things that we’re going to address. Especially when you have a laboratory that is Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments-certified already, we need to start thinking about how to retain those individuals,” Muña told Saipan Tribune.

She said they met with the nursing leadership to get feedback on the restructuring of nurses’ salaries.

She said the adjustment will be a tiered salary based on location, census, and acuity of care that the staff provides.

Muna said the salary rate has never moved since the CNMI government instituted austerity measures in 2001. Staff nurses currently get $33,000 per annum.

She said adjusting salaries would also help them retain employees as competition from other hospitals and locations has been tougher because of the shortage that is being experienced not only in the CNMI but in other islands and in the U.S. mainland as well.

“This is something that is necessary, especially because there’s so much competition in this region to basically get the best people to come and work and provide healthcare services,” Muña said. “It is a matter of ensuring that we provide our services to our people.”

Muña said the hospital already lost a handful of nursing staff to Guam. Even now, a number of nurses are set to leave CHC soon.

She noted that it’s becoming tougher to keep staff in the CNMI as the rate of resignation is faster than the rate of hiring and that they need to act on this.

“We really need to address the situation, we need to be competitive. And we need to recognize those workers that really put so much years in CHCC and are doing a great job,” Muña said. “If we want to keep them, we need to compensate them.”

With the adjustment in compensation, the hospital also hopes to address the staff shortage as well as overtime issues.

“The overall goal is to look at compensation and avoid overtime. If we address the staff shortage, we address overtime,” Muña said. “Paying overtime is really not helping us at all.”