In its effort to improve Guyana’s healthcare services, the Government has revealed its plan to develop a Postgraduate Nursing Institute to enhance personnel in the profession.
This was announced by Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony at the launch of the first online Professional Nursing Training Programme, at the ministry’s boardroom, Brickdam, Georgetown last week.
The Department of Public Information (DPI) reported that postgraduate nursing education involves further study after completion of a bachelor’s degree. In the nursing sciences field, postgraduate education generally recommends that a graduate specialises in a particular field or study within the nursing discipline.
Minister Anthony said without programmes such as these, Guyana will not be able to lift the standards of providing health care in areas such as oncology, and cardiovascular surgeries, among others.
“There’s a whole host of things we want to do but we still need specially trained people … Our training has been a little bit ad-hoc and therefore, just like how we have a postgraduate institute to train doctors, we are going to develop a postgraduate institute to train Nurses, we can’t have one without the other and that is extremely important,” the health minister explained.
This initiative forms part of the government’s holistic approach to improving Guyana’s healthcare services.
Additionally, the three-year Professional Nursing Training Programme is being facilitated through Coursera and will see 1,160 nursing students being trained through online and in-person classes.
To this end, the ministry’s Department of Training is aiming to offer its programmes through this hybrid approach. The practical component of the training will be conducted in simulation centres that are being developed by the government. “I think we can start working to bringing them online and giving people access to them so that they can stay at home and go through some of these programmes … Nursing is actually a pioneer in this regard, because you’re going to open up a new way for us to train health personnel in Guyana … and I think this is quite exciting,” Dr Anthony said.
The government is aiming to train 1,000 nurses annually to bridge the gap in the nursing profession that is a consequence of the brain drain phenomenon.
