Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony told participants in a Continuing Nursing Education (CNE) session that these sessions are a way to ensure that nurses and midwives are kept up-to-date with medical information, a release from the Ministry of Health stated yesterday.
“So it’s a very important thing because medicine is a very dynamic area and daily there are concepts that are being changed, new information that is being made available, discoveries and unless we have sessions where we are keeping ourselves informed very quickly; we’ll be outdated. So the CNE sessions are geared to do that,” he explained. The CNE session was hosted by the Nurses and Midwives Council, Guyana, at the Ministry’s conference room on Brickdam, Georgetown.
According to the release, this CNE session, which was offered both in person and on a virtual platform, commenced yesterday and will conclude today. Some discussions focused primarily on Contraceptives and Patient Safety. Participants of these sessions will be awarded four credit hours, which will be added to their contact hours of training needed each year to re-register.
CNEs are educational activities designed to build on the clinical and educational foundations of nurses and midwives for the improvement of practice, education, administration, and research or theory development to improve the provision of respectable healthcare that reflects the community’s needs.
While commending the nursing council for organising the CNEs, Dr Anthony suggested that the time the sessions are held should be changed since during the day, most people are at work thus making it difficult for some persons to attend. He noted that for future sessions, there should be considerations for different timings or days since it will also allow more people to attend. In his closing remarks, the Health Minister posited that the sessions can be used to provide updated information on developments in the health sector.
“There are many topics that we want to convey to you. Some of them might be in the clinical team, but I think there are other topics that we need to address because I’m not sure that many of you are acquainted with all the things that we are doing in the health sector, and sometimes these sessions can be used as a way of getting information across to people about what we’re doing in the health sector.”
Anthony also highlighted that some of the topics can be focused on the work being done for the elimination of filaria, hepatitis ‘C’, and diabetes.
Attendees at the session included Sharir Chan from the Guyana Cancer Society and a Member of the Nurses and Midwives Council Guyana, and Head of West Demerara Regional Hospital Obstetrics and Gynecology Department, Dr Fareez Khan.
