Frontline Health Personnel to be Given Augmented Compensation Packages
Dean Barrow
Cuba has had a medical brigade deployed in Belize comprising doctors and nurses for years now. At the press conference earlier today, Prime Minister Dean Barrow spoke about how important the frontline medical personnel are to the healthcare system to combat the deadly COVID-19. Aside from being equipped with personal protective equipment, there is also a welfare package that will be granted to them as a token compensation.
Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“The first batch of Cubans will arrive this evening. The plane came from Guatemala, stopped in Belize and then went off to Havana. So by five, six o’clock that batch should be here. But of course that brigade joins our frontline personnel who are so very important to us and whom we must salute and thank profusely for all that they have already been doing. I want to make clear that those frontline persons will be taken care of fully and completely insofar as personal protective equipment is concern, insofar as dealing first of all with the workers at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. Insofar as finding separate quarters for them to live in apart from their family homes, while they are on the frontlines of the struggle so that there can be no question of their endangering the welfare of their family members. They will be taken care of with respect to an augmented compensation package to ensure that they can pay for babysitting services, they can pay for other things that they will need as they remain on the frontline of this existential combat. And they will, as part of that augmented compensation package, be given additional monies as a token of appreciation for this particularly dangerous, but so absolutely vital job of work that they are doing.”
The government of Taiwan, another ally of Belize, is also supporting COVID-19 efforts. That country contributed a first donation of two million dollars to the government, to be used for the purchase of urgently needed medical equipment and materials for the frontline medical service providers in Belize.
