– Health Minister says fellowship programme and advanced systems will strengthen national healthcare capacity
Guyana is being positioned as a regional training hub for robotic surgery as the government continues efforts to expand advanced healthcare services and build local medical capacity.
This is according to Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony, who stated that the country is already putting systems in place to facilitate specialised training in robotic surgery for local and regional medical professionals.
Dr. Anthony made this known during a press conference on Tuesday evening, stating that the government is working to establish an accredited fellowship-style programme through collaboration among the Ministry of Health, the University of Guyana and the Postgraduate Medical Institute.
“We are going to accredit that programme between the Post Grad Institute, University of Guyana, and the Ministry of Health, so that when you go through that training, you will have fellowship training.”
He added that Guyana would be uniquely positioned to offer such specialised instruction because of the systems already installed in the country.
“We would be the only ones that would be able to offer that, because we have the systems here.”
The Health Minister said the initiative forms part of a wider push to develop Guyana into a centre for advanced medical services within the Caribbean.
This comes on the heels of the successful completion of the historic longest distance telesurgery procedure ever conducted using advanced robotic technology.
According to Dr Anthony, discussions have been held with overseas cardiac surgery specialists to further expand Guyana’s robotic cardiac surgery programme and close existing gaps in expertise.
One of the key areas identified was the need for trained perfusionists to support complex heart procedures.
“They’re going to work with us to make sure that we send somebody for training, and they’re going to help us to find that placement, so that we can have our own perfusionist.”
The goal, he said, is to eventually eliminate the need for external teams to support highly specialised procedures.
“We’ll have our own national capacity and be able to do it by ourselves.”
Against this backdrop, Dr Anthony pointed to the government’s broader healthcare transformation agenda, highlighting the expansion of telemedicine, digital health systems and artificial intelligence-assisted diagnostics.
He said an AI-powered X-ray interpretation system is now operating in more than 15 hospitals across Guyana and can rapidly determine abnormalities and provide preliminary diagnoses.
“It takes the current system that we are using 20 seconds to determine something that is normal or abnormal, and then another minute to give you a preliminary diagnosis.”
These advancements, he said, demonstrate that the government’s vision of delivering world-class healthcare is already taking shape.
“When the President speaks about world-class healthcare, it’s not just rhetoric, it is actually delivering world-class healthcare to our patients,” he added.
He also said the infrastructure being developed is intended to benefit not only Guyana but the wider Caribbean region.
