Graduates from the University of Guyana School of Medicine will be able to attend other institutes of higher learning within the Caribbean without having to take any qualifying exams after the school was accredited by the Caribbean Accreditation Authority for Education in Medicine and other Health Professions (CAAM-HP).
The period of accreditation will be until 2012, when it will be reviewed. Making the announcement yesterday, Medical Director of the School, Dr. Carl ‘Max’ Hanoman said it is a “big plus” for the country. He noted that UG and the University of the West Indies are the two accredited schools in the Caribbean at the moment though there are two others: St George’s University in Grenada and Ross University in Dominica.
“The difference between the accreditation in UG and Ross is we don’t have to pay for no exams. There is a free movement of graduates from Guyana to any institute of higher learning without any qualifying exams. That means, they recognize our procedures and our exams that we do here”, he said adding that the local medicine graduates are considered on equal status. He said that this is a big plus for Guyana as it was not easy to get up to the standards required with the limited resources here though there is a lot of commitment. With the granting of the accreditation, Caricom countries need not require graduates of the UGSOM programme to sit a licensing exam during the period of accreditation.
Recalling the period leading up to accreditation, Dr. Hanoman said that UG was visited by a survey team from CAAM in 2006, which did a survey of the facilities to see how it matched up to the standards required. In January 2007, he said, the School received provisional accreditation with certain areas to look at.
He noted that in 2006, UWI was visited by the survey team and the following year was accredited. He stated that UG had to look at some areas of governance and facilities which they did and worked fervently from 2007 up to the present to get up to date in different areas. On reviewing the submissions, last Friday, CAAM accredited the medical programme at UG, he stated.
He said that accreditation means that in areas where post-graduate programmes are not done at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPHC), the students can be trained at UWI. With this development, he said, he hopes that there would be some steps taken by the government to send good graduating students to UWI, keep paying them but contracting them to come back to Guyana to serve for five years so that there is continuity at the GPHC and specialists in each area.
“It opens a whole horizon for them (the graduates)”, the medical director said stating that now that the School has been accredited, it needs to be enhanced because the accreditation team will return in 2012 to see if they are maintaining standards.
CAAM-HP is a Caribbean accreditation body set up by Caribbean Community governments. In the formulation of the Authority, help was received from Canada, the United States, Britain and other Caribbean professionals to create a set of standards as necessary for the functioning of a medical school. Standards created included education resources, internships and staff development, among others. The Authority reports to the Caricom Secretariat.
Meantime, Dr. Hanoman said that there is work to be done. “What we need to do is to have some inputs in the infrastructure for the teachers, for the students of Georgetown Hospital”, he said. Pointing to the area at the GPHC hit by fire sometime ago, he said that he is hoping that the Government will build classrooms and teaching space “because we are moving at a pace”. He said that GPHC will be a major teaching centre and because of the accreditation, applications will be received from the Caribbean and further afield.
In this light he said, the fee structure will have to be examined pointing out that UG has the cheapest medical school in the Caribbean with the fee for foreign students being US$6200 per year and local students US$2500 and it is tough to survive on that “so we have to look at that because we have to survive”. He said that a school must have enough finances to pay its staff and buy enough equipment. “We do have because there is input from the government but we need more and to maintain our accreditation”.
Dr. Hanoman said currently there are 56 full and part-time teaching staff in the medical programme at UG but there are also visiting professors and other teams while the GPHC has consultants. Currently there are 148 students enrolled in the MBBS programme, he said.
