MINISTER of Public Telecommunications, Catherine Hughes,was given a comprehensive tour of the spanking new Texila American University (TAU) campus at Providence, East Bank Demerara.
Texila is an accredited private medical school owned by the Texila American University Limited, headquartered in New Jersey, USA. The university has been operating in Guyana since September 2010,and now offers undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in medicine, nursing, public health and allied sciences.
Spearheading the tour were Vice Chancellor, Dr. A. Anand, and Head of Operations, Immanuel Prabalanatham who showed the minister the school’s state-of-art laboratories, classrooms and examination rooms, mock trauma centre and other medical teaching facilities.
They explained Texila’s broad use of advanced information technology for teaching and research. Minister Hughes, in offering brief remarks, said it is her Ministry’s vision to evolutionalise telemedicine in Guyana. It was on this note that the Texila officials disclosed that telemedicine is one of their near-term objectives, that is, to train medical personnel for this relatively new field of medicine in the developed world.
Minister Hughes expressed the hope that Guyana could achieve this goal in the foreseeable future for the benefit of citizens located away from administrative centres, especially in the hinterland.
Not many trained medical personnel work in the interior, she explained, but soon the residents there will have access to the Internet. This is the first component for telemedicine.