–help gov’t ‘do more with less’

SIEMENS, a German conglomerate company, has signalled its intent to invest in the local public health sector.
The company, which is headquartered in Berlin and Munich, is the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe with branch offices abroad.
The principal divisions of the company are Industry, Energy, Healthcare and Infrastructure and Cities, which represent the main activities of the company.

It is a prominent manufacturer of medical diagnostic equipment and its medical health-care division, which generates about 12 per cent of the company’s total sales, is its second most profitable unit, after the industrial automation division.
According to a press statement from the Ministry of Public Health, a three-member delegation from the company met with Public Health Minister Volda Lawrence and a high-level team recently.

The delegation from Siemiens proposed a tentative plan, which they felt could help accelerate modernisation of the local public health system.
“Our purpose is to make healthcare providers succeed, and to do more with less,” said Business Partner Manager at Siemens Healthcare, Roberto Tovar during the meeting.
Tovar assured the subject minister and members of the ministry that the German conglomerate is not opportunistically angling itself to maximise profits from the financial fortunes of the much-anticipated transition to a petro-based economy, following huge offshore oil finds by the American giant, ExxonMobil.

“We want to be part of a society we get there to boost social impact,” said Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Siemens South America, Daniel Fernandez.
Fernandez said that in Colombia, Siemens implemented programmes which helped provide some 300,000 nationals with access to potable water, and worked in the education system to help make science and technology attractive to learners because, globally, people are not attracted to those disciplines.

Minister within the Ministry of Public Health, Dr. Karen Cummings, challenged the German firm to familiarise themselves with the University of Guyana (UG), especially its Natural Sciences department, to help strengthen programmes there.
“This should not be a challenge; I see no limitations,” Fernandez assured the ministerial team.

Since its election to office in 2015, the A Partnership for National Unity and Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) coalition government has pushed leasing and, where appropriate, retrofitting of equipment to improve health-sector services.
“We are looking at the leasing of an entire laboratory to bring improved service to our people,” Minister Lawrence said.

She said there are also projections to fully equip the local reference laboratory to deliver a large range of services to Guyanese.
Lawrence said through the likely partnership with Siemens, they hope to prioritise fighting cancers, cardiovascular ailments and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as part of a wider long-term vision, which includes upgrading systems in the sprawling hinterland.
Siemens started in 1896 with the manufacturing of industrial X-ray appliances for medical diagnostics.

Since then, the German firm has added a wide range of other products such as CLINISTIX-dry chemistry for testing for glucose in urine; the first real-time ultrasound scanner; track-based laboratory automation system; diagnostic analyser integrating four technologies in one system; robotic-assisted angiography system; multi-modality 3D imaging system; and wide-angle image acquisition breast Tomosynthesis among other hi-tech services, a company document said.

Tomosynthesis is “a method for performing high-resolution, limited-angle tomography at radiation dose levels comparable with projectional radiography. It has been studied for a variety of clinical applications, including vascular imaging, dental imaging, orthopaedic imaging, mammographic imaging, musculoskeletal imaging, and chest imaging,” an online source explained.

It said in its 120-year existence, the company has been granted some 12,500 patents globally; amassed over 46,000 employees; has access to 1.2 billion of the world’s population; operate with an annual revenue of some £13.5B and is determined to add Guyana to the other 75 countries in which they have a permanent presence.
Importantly for the ministry, Siemens offers point of care (POC) services which, according to the document, include multiple sites, hundreds of instruments, thousands of operators and “provides full control over our customers’ testing environment”.
The POC, the document said, also provides end-to-end eco-system solutions in prevention, critical care and consolidation and standardisation.

While in Guyana, the team also had discussions with Minister of State, Mr. Joe Harmon; Minister of Public Infrastructure, David Patterson; Minister within the Ministry of Public Infrastructure, Annette Ferguson; and Natural Resources Minister, Raphael Trotman.