Amid challenges to fill vacancies within the medical sector, and on the heels of the GPHC announcing the need for at least 700 nurses, health minister Dr. Frank Anthony is optimistic that those posts will soon be filled.
At his end-of-year press conference last week, Anthony stated that to address the problem the ministry has worked with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) on a staffing plan.
“So the ministry, we have worked with PAHO, and we have done a staffing plan of how many people we would need to address some of the migration that we have and also to address the expansion that we are doing and for each of the new regional hospitals, for example, we have quantified how many people we need. So we have how many specialists, how many registrars, how many GMOs, how many nurses, how many midwives, how many laboratory people. All of it we have quantified, and we have been working to train persons locally to be able to meet those demands”. He said.
The GPHC at their end-of-year press conference had said that an investigation they led proved that majority of the nurses who have reportedly migrated actually left the institution to work for private health sector right in Guyana.
To remedy the situation, he alluded to training programmes the ministry is currently running for thousands of nurses. However, the deficit of doctors, laboratory technicians and others still remains.
“That is why we have started this hybrid programme, and through the hybrid programme, we have been able to enroll at least 1,100 persons in the first batch, this year, we took in another 1,000 persons, next year, we’ll take in maybe another 1,000 or so. The challenge that we have is that to train a professional nurse, it takes at least three years. So even though we start these programmes, we are not going to get a professional nurse until three years”.
The first batch of students for the training programme began training in October of 2023, a three-year programme which means that the first batch of students graduates in 2026. He said that “while we are waiting on those persons to graduate and we continue to train and so forth, we’ll have a gap”.
But in the interim, the ministry will be filling those gaps by bringing persons from abroad.
Speaking confidently that when the six hospitals which are expected to come on stream, three by the end of the first quarter in 2025 and three in the second Anthony stated that “when these six hospitals are ready, they’ll be fully operational because we have made plans to staff them both with local and overseas staffing. And so that would be fully operational by the middle of next year”, he said. However, those persons coming from overseas would not arrive until the opening of the hospital is near.
The new hospitals coming on stream according to Anthony will include six new accident and emergency units that would be operating on a 24-hour basis, a new imaging section for each of these hospitals, six CT scans operating on a 24-hour basis across the country, new 24-hour laboratory services along with new delivery rooms amongst others.
Additionally, he noted that while all six of the hospitals will be added some will be replacing existing ones which means that the staff at the existing hospitals will go over to the new ones.
Added to the training and new hires, Anthony made mention of changes to the duties a nurse carries out and the hiring of other persons to perform those duties.
“We are also training a lot of nursing assistants they would work under the supervision of a nurse. We also relooked at the work that a nurse is required to do. Sometimes a nurse goes from the ward to go to the pharmacy to pick up the medication from the pharmacy to bring it back on the ward, those non-nursing things, we are employing a new category of people who can go pick up medication, bring it to the ward, and so forth. So as to minimize the things that you want the nurse to do so that we have started at the Georgetown Hospital”. Anthony said.
The GPHC at their press conference had stated that the hospital is in need of at least 700 nurses and more beds to perform at its best and that the hospital continues to grapple with general staff shortages. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at the Hospital Robbie Rambarran stated that despite the hiring of 36 Cuban nurses, a strategy the government has embarked upon to address the staff shortage at the hospital there is still a deficit of at least 700 nurses at the institution.