A multi-stakeholder meeting was held by the Region Six Regional Health Services Thursday to discuss and implement strategies to curb suicides.The meeting, which saw attendance by several NGOs, healthcare personnel, the Guyana Police Force, the Prison Service and others, was part of an ongoing consultation.
According to Alex Foster, President of St. Francis Community Developers and facilitator of the discussion, the main purpose of the session was aimed at “taking the fight to the people.”
“The Regional Health Service has a team of trained doctors, nurses, peer educators and counsellors and unless they reach out they won’t be able to help. Our strategy is to take them to the people instead of waiting until it’s too late.
“We will target the hard-to-reach areas and areas that have recorded instances of suicide and take our human resources there to educate and provide information to the public, so that they can be more aware of the level of help that is available and at their disposal.
“If the mountain can’t come to the people we will take the people to the mountain”, Foster said.
The other strategies include regular television programmes to address the rate of suicide. This has already been given the go-ahead by the Regional Health Service stakeholders Committee for Suicide.
Further, using sports as a means of getting people meaningfully occupied in indoor and outdoor activities, could also help, Foster stated, but pointed to lack of facilities as one reason why many youths are not involved in sports.
“When we speak about sports we are not only referring to cricket; we need a variety of sports to choose from and the government and other stakeholders need to put infrastructure in place to facilitate this.
“You need indoor games where you can play, but still have conversations – games where you can appease your aggressive behaviour like boxing or football or basketball.
“However, many times the only facilities that are available are that [sic] for cricket.”
Foster said the consultations have been ongoing for some time now and as more people get on board, more ideas and strategies would be developed so as to reduce the rate of suicide in Region Six.