WITH dozens of new health facilities being opened and more hospitals under construction, Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony says the Ministry of Health is aggressively expanding training programmes for nurses, doctors and allied health workers to ensure the country has enough personnel to operate the growing health system.
Speaking on Starting Point, Minister Anthony said staffing has become a major focus as government continues to roll out new hospitals, health centres and health posts across Guyana. He noted that while infrastructure expansion is visible, the human resource push behind it often goes unnoticed.
“Because of this expansion in terms of the 30 new facilities, the health centres, the health posts, and of course the six new hospitals, it requires a lot of people to run the system,” Minister Anthony said.
To meet growing demand, the ministry has significantly expanded nurse training, moving beyond Guyana’s traditional three nursing schools in Linden, Georgetown and New Amsterdam, which were only able to train about 200 nurses annually. Through partnerships with WHO/PAHO and a WHO collaborating centre at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, Guyana is being assisted in regards to training nurses online.
Additionally, nurses are being trained using a portal on the Coursera platform to rapidly increase capacity.
“Over the last three years, we have been training nurses using that portal. This year in July, we would graduate about 800 nurses and once they are successful, get their certification, all 800 would be employed by the Ministry of Health,” Minister Anthony said.
To support practical learning, the ministry also established simulation centres in all 10 administrative regions, allowing nurses to complete hands-on training closer to home.
“A simulation centre would have mannequins and all these things, so as the nurses complete modules of theoretical training, we bring them into the simulation centres and we are able to teach them the practical components. That has been working very well and has helped us to improve how we train people,” the Minister explained.
Beyond nursing, the ministry is expanding training across multiple health disciplines, including registered nurses, midwives, nursing assistants, pharmacy assistants and other technical areas through approximately 20 separate programmes.
“ About a week ago, we had the CARPHA Conference and many of the Caribbean countries, they have similar problems like us, like migration of nurses and shortages and so forth, when they saw the model that we are using, they are asking us now to be part of the system because they recognised this is the way in which they can address some of their problems,” the Minister said.
Training capacity has increased by about 100 percent over the last two to three years, while the ministry has employed close to 5,000 persons in the health sector.
Doctor training is also being scaled up to meet future staffing needs. The University of Guyana’s medical intake has been expanded, while government is moving to roll out pre-medical and pre-clinical training in all 10 regions so students can begin foundational studies closer to their communities before advancing to clinical training.
The newly operational hospitals are also being equipped with classroom spaces to support on-site learning and clinical training.
“While I spoke about the nurses, we are also doing a lot of work with our doctors. The undergrad programme at the University of Guyana has been expanded from about 60 persons to 120 persons,” Anthony said.
The Ministry of Health has partnered with several overseas bodies to further boost specialised training. These include MacMasters Canada, Northwell hospital chain in New York and Apollo in India.
“Currently, we have a cardiac surgeon in Apollo so there are a lot of options we are using to skill the people in the system and when they come back, they help us upgrade the kinds of care we are giving to our patients so that is how we are expanding and changing the system qualitatively,” Minister Anthony revealed.
Meanwhile Minister Anthony noted that about two weeks ago, the Ministry of Health and the European Union signed an agreement from which Guyana will benefit from a 2.1 million euros grant with Agency France for training purposes.
“People from Europe are going to come to Guyana to train our medical professionals and our medical professionals will go to Europe Universities to improve their skills. That’s one area but we also have doctors from other countries to work, we are happy to host them and if we have a need, we will be recruiting those people as well,” the Health Minister said.
The long-term strategy is to build enough trained healthcare workers to effectively man Guyana’s rapidly expanding healthcare infrastructure and improve access to care nationwide.
