Senior Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance and the Public Service, Dr Ashni Singh has posited that the health sector faces the challenge of having sufficient skilled personnel, an issue he says his government is moving to address.
Dr Singh made these remarks while participating in the second high level meeting of the Economic and Health Dialogue of the Americas (EHA) Initiative, held in Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic, a Ministry of Finance release stated yesterday. He further noted that “the question of adequate supply of trained health sector professionals is one that cannot be confronted nationally alone, it has to be confronted regionally, and even hemispherically,” and urged for hemispheric action to address human resource deficit in the health sector.
According to the release, the EHA Initiative was chaired by the Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, US Department of State, Jose W. Fernandez, and was attended by finance and health ministers from across the Americas. It informed that EHA in collaboration with the US State Department and Department of Commerce, focuses the region’s governments, private sector and civil society on shared challenges and opportunities to build resilient, inclusive, sustainable, and equitable health economies and ecosystems.
During his remarks, the minister discussed some of the challenges facing countries like Guyana. He pointed out that here, population density is relatively low, and with several communities being remote from the major urban centres, delivering care to the entire population is extremely challenging and expensive. Therefore, as part of its efforts at attaining President Irfaan Ali’s goal of improving access to and delivery of social services for all Guyanese citizens, the government is building out 12 regional hospitals, and potentially as many as 50 centres with some form of telemedicine capabilities, which will aid in remote diagnosis, potentially allowing for remote treatment.
Turning his attention to the human resource deficit in the health sector, Dr Singh noted, “Perhaps the single biggest challenge we face in the health sector is ensuring that we have an adequate supply of suitably skilled doctors and nurses, bearing in mind that we are operating in an environment where the market for skilled medical professionals is a global market and that there is a global shortage of supply of skilled health sector professionals, and therefore, the question of adequate supply of trained health sector professionals is one that cannot be confronted nationally alone, it has to be confronted regionally and even hemispherically.”
Faced with this deficit, the Minister said that the Government of Guyana has responded by investing heavily in the training of health sector professionals including doctors and nurses, building out of two new nursing schools, and utilising online platforms for the delivery of nurse training.
Dr Singh thanked the relevant agencies of the United States Government for providing leadership in this hemispheric approach to this “most pressing challenge” to ensuring that the region is equipped to manage and contain public health risk. He also highlighted the absolute necessity for coordinated hemispheric and multilateral approaches in confronting problems that are multinational in nature, with public health risks being perhaps the most obvious example of such problems, a lesson that would have been learnt from the recent COVID-19 pandemic.
