Guyana laying groundwork to become Caribbean medical hub

Last Updated on Monday, 16 October 2023, 20:21 by Denis Chabrol

Guyana is training more nurses, providing advanced training to doctors, buying higher quality equipment and encouraging surgeons from across the Caribbean to come here to share their expertise as part of a wider plan to gear up the country to become a medical “hub” for the rest of the region, according to Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony.

“In another couple of years, with the kinds of investments that we are making, we are sure that we can become a hub for a lot of different types of activities and one of the visions of our President is not just to improve care for Guyanese. That’s our primary focus but whatever we’re doing here, we will open it up to the rest of the region,” he told the opening of a two-day Caribbean Society of Endoscopic Surgeons (CaSES) conference.

He said the Ministry of Health has decided to standardise equipment in the public health sector to eliminate short-life operations and reduce the number of purchases. “We feel, sometimes, that we can go, and we buy things that are cheaper but, in the end, it doesn’t last too long, and you keep buying over and over again. If we standardise and use good, high-quality equipment, then we’d be training people and probably would be getting better results,” he said.

Noting that the state-owned Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) had performed an organ transplant for a national of a sister Caribbean country “for free” instead of paying US$500,000 in the United States, Dr Anthony encouraged surgeons,who attended the CaSES conference, to return to Guyana and share their expertise with their counterparts in Guyana.

Though the Ministry of Health enjoys post-graduate training relationships with Mc Masters and York University in Canada and soon with Mount Sinai in the United States, the Health Minister identified the need for a similar relationship with surgeons under the CaSES umbrella.

“We haven’t done much cross-collaboration with the Caribbean and I think there is a big opportunity here for us to do a lot of that type of collaboration so I’m very happy that with CaSES that one of the things that we do is that when you come to a country, you’re able to do some of these unique cases and offer training but maybe we need to look at a more long term way where if there is a deficit of skills that a  country has,” he said.

He said gradually, the local health sector was being equipped to position Guyana to do some of the things that have been going in the rest of the Caribbean.  The Health Minister reasoned that if the skills of doctors in Guyana are strengthened, that would benefit the Caribbean. On that note, he encouraged conference participants to come to Guyana as often as possible to experience what is being done in the health sector and learn from them.

Dr Anthony envisaged a programme in which experts could go to Guyana and other Caribbean nations and work for six months, one year or more to lift the skills of their colleagues so that as a region, there would be a lot more endoscopic surgeries.

“I think this is very important and this is something we’re really willing to explore because I think it would make a big difference and help us to transition, make that paradigm shift from the regular types, traditional types of surgery that we’ve been doing to one that is much better for our patients,” he said.

With the number and quality of minimally invasive surgeries in the Caribbean increasing, according to President of CaSES Dr Wesley Francis, the Guyanese Health Minister added that the benefits also include less cuts, less bleeding and vastly reduced time in hospital.

“In a way, the health system can benefit when we’re spending less money per patient and their stay is vastly reduced. Generally, we see less complications, less risk of infections so they’re many, many advantages of doing this,” he said.

He admitted that the challenge is to shift from traditional surgeries to laparoscopic surgery. In terms of coming to grips with human resource challenges, the Health Minister praised Dr Ramcharran for training at least 20 surgeons since his return from post graduate training in Canada.

Infrastructurally, he said six regional hospitals would include main and minor theatres as well as “a lot of instruments that are needed for endoscopic surgery” would be installed at the new regional hospital to be built in New Amsterdam. He added that would also be equipped with not only ultrasound and x-ray equipment but also CT scanners.

As Developed Nations continue to recruit Guyanese nurses, the Health Minister said Guyana was currently training 1, 200 nurses Online, simulated and hospital internships to meet Guyana’s needs. “We are looking over the next three years to at least train about 4,000 nurses so that, at least, we can have them in our system and so we can function optimally,” he said. “Once they finish the theoretical components, they are now going to be doing practical work in some simulation labs that we’re developing and then later on move to the hospital so we think this is a good solution that we can use to help us to get the kinds of persons that we need in our hospital,” he said.

He cautioned that if the Caribbean does not address the migration of nurses, “it can lead to a degradation of the quality of health care that we can provide.”