THE Guyana Nurses Association (GNA) has called on nurses to further their education at the opening of a two-day education seminar at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre (ACCC) on Tuesday.

At the seminar, local health experts and visiting representatives from health organisations in the Guyanese diaspora transferred their wealth of knowledge.

The attending nurses were taught on the topics of quality improvement, mental health, nursing in the technological age and the importance of research in clinical practice, among others.

On the topic of advancement in nursing education, a panel of eight senior specialists assembled to highlight the value of nursing education in Guyana, targeting primarily young nurses.

Those on the panel included United Nations Population Fund (UNFP) Midwifery Specialist in South Sudan, Gillian Butts-Garnett; Coordinator of the National Tuberculosis Field of Operations at the Ministry of Public Health, Nicola Melville; and Coordinator of the University of Guyana (UG) Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) Nursing Education Programme, Afesha Marshall.

Others included Senior Lecturer of the B.Sc Nursing Programme, Tabitha Malampattie; former Director of Health Sciences Education at the Ministry of Health, Wilton Benn; GNA President Cleopatra Barkoye and midwifery adviser, Mandy La Fleur.

La Fleur, who was the panel’s moderator, believes that many persons still have misconceptions about university degree programmes.

Through the seminars, she hopes that nurses can begin to find solutions to “systemic bottlenecks” such as time off from work that continue to hinder their advancement towards higher education.

“We want to be able to talk to our young people, especially our young nurses to let them see themselves as being able to achieve higher education in Guyana,” she said.

She added: “We want to be able to set this platform for these young nurses so that they can see themselves moving to the level of where these senior nurses are.”

One of the main pushes at the seminar was for the nurses to move past their diploma achievement level to the B.Sc Nursing Programme offered at UG.
Malampattie, who teaches the programme, has been a nurse educator since 1997, and studied in India.

She presented to the gathering a comparative study conducted in 2015 on the challenges and strategies of nursing education in Guyana and India.

NOTABLE CHALLENGES

Speaking with this newspaper, she said the challenges identified specific to Guyana were lack of adequate and qualified faculty; insufficient learning and teaching resources; lack of professionalism demonstrated among nurses; and limited clinical experiences.

“In Guyana, some recommendations were made, one of which is to accredit all the programmes offered in Guyana just like the rest of the Caribbean and another was to provide adequate, qualified nursing faculty because when you have good education you will have a good nursing work force,” she stressed.

Other recommendations the research highlighted were improved infrastructure, professional development programmes for faculty and for the Regional Examination for Nurse Registration (RENR) to be offered in Guyana.

“We don’t do that exam in Guyana, we’re not prepared for that examination and so we are at a disadvantage. It is actually impeding our common economy and single market process. If our nurses are prepared for that regional examination to practice nursing then that is definitely going to benefit our country to receive income whereby more nurses would come here and our nurses can also practice anywhere else,” Malampattie said, addressing the latter.

Apart from the B.Sc programme, the university also offers a master’s in nursing education which is supported by a number of agencies such as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the University of St. Joseph in the US as well as a Doctoral Programme in nursing offered through the São Paulo University in Brazil.

Some of the core areas nurses can receive training in through the B.Sc programme include nursing professionalism, critical care, primary health care, research methodology and leadership and management in nursing.

“The world is changing, the Caribbean is moving towards entry-to-practice at the B.Sc level, meaning that you cannot just have your diploma to practise, you have to have a degree. So we have to encourage them [nurses] to start to recognise very clearly that nursing is dynamic and you have to be educated to be able to be the best of what you can be,” said former director of Health Sciences Education, Wilton Benn.

The two-day education seminar is a part of a string of activities in commemoration of the GNA’s 90th anniversary and its Global Guyanese Nurses Reunion Conference which began on Monday.