WITH the health system countrywide currently short of approximately 1,000 nurses and still facing the effects of a brain drain, the Ministry of Public Health is looking to increase the numbers of nurses being trained for each batch.

Speaking with media personnel on Monday, as the Ministry launched a new batch of medics to embark on a four year training programme, Minister of Public Health Volda Lawrence acknowledged that migration continues to be a problem.

“Right now we need about 1,000 more nurses in the system. Migration is not only a Guyana issue. We will continue to see migration not only in nursing, not only in midwifery but in many other skilled areas. This has been a complaint right up to the World Health Organisation (WHO) by the less developed countries, where the developed countries are coming into our areas and employing persons. Given that, what is it we’re going to do?” she questioned.

The solution for the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) will be to ramp up the numbers even more, so that the rate of those entering the medical field is faster than those leaving it.
“We are looking at projections, we’re projecting ahead today that we’re not training 20 medics, our aim was to get 40 to train. Secondly, we are moving to ensure that once their year is completed that we start another batch, so that in a time frame of 8 –12 years we will be able to say that we are solid in terms of the numbers we have. In terms of nursing, instead of training 20 or 30 we’re about to roll out a programme where we’re going to be training 100 nurses. We have to do that in order to ensure that we can first fulfill our requirements,” the minister explained.

In 2016, the Ministry contemplated importing nurses when the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) faced a direct struggle in meeting its numbers.

Minister Lawrence says that there is the supply of fit persons applying to become nurses, so the problem was a matter of finding the space to accommodate them, with this new aim she hopes to address that.

“We have lots of applications from persons who [meet] the requirements, but we don’t have the space to put them. That’s why we have moved to this new programme where we’re going to do training, we’re renting somewhere so we can have it done in a larger scale,” she relayed.