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New doctors will reduce hospital waiting period

Aug 17, 2009 News


– Dr Ramsammy

The delivery of health care offered by the public health sector is poised to be significantly improved with the addition of 65 new doctors who recently completed their medical training in Cuba.
They represent the largest contingent of doctors to be incorporated to the local health sector at a single time, according to Health Minister, Dr Leslie Ramsammy.
And according to the Minister, the presence of the new doctors will adequately address the problem of long waiting periods for patients, a problem which is common primarily at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation.
“Overall, the GPHC has done an excellent job but the chronic problem it has, in terms of its services, has been long waits. Sometimes 200 people have a need to be treated but there is only one doctor.”
However, with the new batch and other batches to come, the Minister disclosed that the Ministry will be able to reduce the waiting period by putting more doctors in the areas that usually have large amount of patients.
Regional hospitals, he noted, will also benefit in like manner, as additional doctors will be dispatched there. According to him, facilities such as the New Amsterdam, Suddie, Linden and the West Demerara hospitals will have more doctors and by extension will reduce patients’ need to visit the GPHC.
Additional doctors will also be placed at the district hospitals and at the Diagnostic centres to ensure that there are sufficient staffers at those levels as well.
And then there will be the introduction of doctors at health centres.
For example, he said that all 27 health centres of Region Six will have doctors assigned to them shortly. “They will not be there on an everyday basis; they don’t need to have them every day. But they will be supporting the medexes and nurses that are available at the health centres.”
However, the Minister noted that some Regions such as Region Four that have large Health Centres will have a doctor assigned.
With the addition of the doctors at varying levels of the health sector, the Minister noted that citizens will now have greater access to doctors, adding that from the national referral hospital all the way to the health post, there will be doctors available.
“This changes the paradigm. In Guyana it used to be that only the National and Regional Hospitals had doctors and some districts had but this will change. On the continuum we will have doctors leading the provision of services and the consequent will be improved health care for the people.”
But even as the additional doctors are strategically placed, the Minister disclosed that the Health Ministry will be faced with more daunting challenges as it relates to training and retaining support staff.
According to the Minister, the effectiveness of the doctors will be dependent on meeting their need for support teams. As such he noted that the Ministry’s training programmes will have to be accelerated over the next few years.
The 65 new doctors were a part of a graduation exercise for scholarship students which occurred last week at the National Cultural Centre. Already some of them have been dispatched to various hospitals, said the Minister.

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