COME 2019, the Ministry of Public Health will be looking to lease medical equipment to help alleviate some of the many challenges the ministry is facing in ensuring it has the necessary equipment at health facilities across the country.

The issues facing Guyana’s public health system in having modernised medical equipment are multifaceted, and the industry has been hard pressed to come up with a solution.
Minister of Health, Volda Lawrence, says that that as of 2019 the government will be looking to lease medical equipment. Speaking to a gathering on Monday the minister explained that a lack of the necessary personnel, coupled with outdated and unstandardised equipment has been making it increasingly difficult for the ministry to maintain the current equipment that it has.

“It’s an every single day task that we have to ensure that we equip all health facilities. We’re having challenges, serious challenges with that,” the Minister conveyed. “Over the many years while we were training many doctors we did not train bio-technicians, so we have a dilemma in that, and we have been trying our best to ensure that we train as many persons as we can. But we can only do so much with what we have. Many of the equipment we have need replacing, many of them are outdated, you cannot walk into a store and find parts for them, and because we don’t have standardisation in the type of equipment that we have across the country, that is causing another problem. They go here they will find one type of equipment, and then they go there the other equipment is another brand.”
However the minister believes that moving to the option of leasing will relieve many of these difficulties, particularly the need to train the necessary personnel and finding parts for the available equipment. “In 2019, we have a new policy now in the ministry to go towards leasing the equipment. We feel that with that we will be able to not only have adequate equipment and dated equipment, but it will take away from the staff of the ministry the need to find a biomedical technician when it’s broken, to source the parts for us to have those machines working so we wouldn’t have to deal with all of that if we lease,” Lawrence related.

Adding that “if we lease then it will be the company that will be responsible for all of that. So we are thinking ahead of how we can address this issue because it’s not just a one institution issue it’s across Guyana”.