Georgetown: Alluding to his belief that there have been several regular attempts to embarrass the administration, Minister of Health, Dr. Bheri Ramsaran, has insisted that his Ministry will be unrelenting when it comes to the delivery of health care. As part of this effort, he said that local training programmes to bolster the quota of health workers will be a sustained feature. He made reference to the notion that “there have been attempts to regularly embarrass the administration by saying our salaries are poor and we can’t keep our people… our best nurses are in the Caribbean and right across the globe but if we didn’t train them you couldn’t get them. If some of the islands that are getting some of our best nurses had to train our nurses they could not afford to pay them but that is another discussion on how we train and retain our personnel so it is good that we have our local programmes.”
In addition to training programmes, the Minister said that his Ministry has commenced collaboration with a number of individuals and organizations to help expand its delivery of health care service. The Ministry, he revealed had just recently commenced collaboration with the management of the Fogarty’s Shopping Center, Water Street, Georgetown, with a view of securing space there to offer vision screening and cervical cancer screening and other health services. “The Ministry is reaching out more and more and we need also to get into the densely populated areas,” the Minister noted, pointing out that over the past 10 days a team has been addressing the health care needs of 1,000 citizens in the Cane Grove area with emphasis on the school children and “they have been doing dental work and vision screening.” Recently optometry care was offered on the Essequibo Coast and Linden through a collaborative effort between the Ministry, the Guyana Association of Optometrists and the University of Guyana’s Faculty of Health Sciences and the University of the West Indies.
According to the Minister, “it is never a burden to deliver health care especially eye care and we have been doing a lot of things in this area.” He noted that outreach activities, which have been very robust, is important since Guyana is made up of very peculiar terrain which is as large as the United Kingdom even as he pointed to the fact that “everybody wants the same treatment so it is a strain on our budget and the human resource and that has forced us to introduce more training programmes…We have been successful at this but at the same time there has been attrition…”
Nevertheless, he commended the efforts of the University of Guyana’s Faculty of Health Sciences which has been regularly producing health professionals who have been serving the health sector well. “I congratulate our University because sometimes some people find it difficult to accept our home is good…” the Minister noted.
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