Demerara Waves Online News- Guyana Riding on the Crest of Truth
Last Updated on Sunday, 4 February 2024, 15:07 by Denis Chabrol
President Irfaan Ali and Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony touring the new GPHC Pathology Laboratory
The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation’s (GPHC) new, sophisticated Pathology Laboratory will reduce the time persons wait on cancer test results, and the service will also be available to sister Caribbean Community, officials said at the official opening of the multi-million dollar facility.
“We want here to be the go-to center in the Caribbean and I think with the types of equipment that we now have; that persons in the Caribbean, if they want to do these types of tests rather than sending them out to the US, they can send them to us so that we can be able to do these tests. for them,” Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony said.
The World Bank funded the laboratory equipment totaling GY$356,355,510 consumables atGY$64,084,000. The total cost of the project, including rehabilitation of the building and Information Technology infrastructure, totalled GY$474,688,997.
President Irfaan Ali said, in keeping with Guyana’s thrust to share its prosperity with the rest of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), he added that the GPHC’s Pathology Lab would be available to the rest of the region. “Importantly, our ultimate goal is to make this lab available to all of CARICOM to all of this region because this is one of its kind in CARICOM now and we wanted to be of service to CARICOM,” he said.
GPHC Chief Executive Officer, Robbie Rambarran said, unlike the old lab whose turnaround time had been reduced from 35 days to seven days, the new facility would complete tests within a maximum of 24 hours. “With this new lab, a conducive environment, more trained staff. We aim to achieve a turnaround time for routine tests in 48 hours and urgent tests within 24,” he said at the official opening of the facility located in the southern wing of the GPHC Complex on Middle Street. He said for the first time the modern, state-of-the art Pathology Lab for the first time gives Guyana the capacity to conduct froze section tests in a matter of minutes to ascertain malignancy of tissues during surgeries.
In terms of biopsies, Dr Anthony said the Pathology Laboratory would reduce the wait time from between three to six months to about seven days, and eventually three to five days. “When people take a biopsy, they don’t have to worry for too long because I know a lot of people get very anxious when they when a biopsy is taken they’re worried to know whether they have cancer or not. And so by having faster turnaround time, we’ll be able to assuage some of those anxieties,” he said.
The GPHC CEO said his team has already started working to achieve certification from the National Bureau of Standards by the end of April an international accreditation of ISO standard 15189 2002 by the end of July.
The Health Minister said the new Pathology Laboratory would allow medical experts to go beyond X-Rays, scans, ultrasounds and mammograms in advancing cancer diagnosis and treatment. “With this pathology lab, we realize that these tests that we need to do if we are going to advance how we treat cancer in Guyana is it’s not just about doing the imaging. But we need to make sure that we can do the various types of testing to differentiate the types of cancers which one would be more responsive to which type of treatment and once we are able to do that, then we will have better outcomes. This laboratory will assist us to do that,” he said during the opening ceremony which coincides with World Cancer Day. He said the lab would also be able to conduct a range of hormonal and histopathology tests that “previously we were unable to do.”
Dr Anthony, a former GPHC doctor, said the lab has the capacity to send digitized samples to Mount Sinai’s Hospital in New York for even more advanced testing. “Doing digital pathology allows us to do a couple of things. One will prepare the slides here. We’ll be able to take an image of those slides here and then we can send them off to Mount Sinai so that they their pathologist would be able to review the slides and give us a second opinion if that is necessary. And that is that is a very important thing for us because we want to make sure that when we present a diagnosis that we have an accurate diagnosis. World Bank. Resident Representative for Guyana and Suriname, Diletta Doretti said the state of the art equipment would help modernize the analysis of samples but also very importantly, supporting production or the telepathology which she described as “a really big game changer.”
The Pathology Laboratory, he added, is als0 expected to improve Guyana’s cancer research capacity because it would be able to provide details about each cancer to a high degree of accuracy that were not previ0usly available locally. “When you look at our cancer registry, a lot of times the way that we are classifying cancers were in a very crude way because we did not have the finer techniques of understanding the different types of cancer and therefore to be able to classify it properly was always a problem,” he said.