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Public Health sector on course to retain nurses – Health Minister

Feb 12, 2010 News

By Sharmain Cornette

Failure on the part of the Ministry of Health to create an environment allowing for the elevation of nurses has been directly linked to their emigration over the years. However, efforts to reverse this phenomenon have commenced and will be sustained as the public health sector seeks to improve its delivery of service.
Citing an example, Minister of Health Dr. Leslie Ramsammy said that in 1996, the Ministry had trained a total of eight nurses as Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners, a programme that was undertaken over an 18-month period.
However, in order for these trained nurses to elevate themselves to the level of midwives, they would have been forced to abandon their psychiatric training, a factor which resulted in them seeking to find more accommodating places of work. Currently, Minister Ramsammy disclosed, all of these nurses, except one, have departed Guyana “because we didn’t create the condition for them to move up.” As a result, the local public health system is currently lacking this level of personnel, as training in the area of psychiatry has not continued since the last batch of 1996. But according to the Minister, it is the intention of the Ministry to resume the programme this year with the elevation of nurses in mind.
In the past, the Minister reflected that the only way of moving upwards was, “if you served in out-of-town areas. You had to be posted at Mabaruma, Mahdia and so on. It was the only way to move up. But it wasn’t done fairly. It was a situation of if I don’t like you, you will never get promoted”.
As a result, he opined that a number of junior persons had superseded their superiors. This trend has since come to an end, however, with persons now being promoted on the basis of merit. At the moment, the Ministry still has an urgent need for specialist nurses to move upward in the system.
Nonetheless, the outward emigration of nurses, the Minister said, is further driven by the limited private sector vocation and by the fact that salaries in some instances may not be attractive. “If you look at salaries in the public and private sector, you will see in most cases the public sector salary is higher. If you look at the matron level, for example, in the public sector they make between 10 and 15 percent more than the private,” the Minister asserted.
“As such, in Guyana, the option of moving internally is a bit more limited. In some countries like Barbados you can move from public to private and make more money, but the only real option here is to leave if you want more money,” he added. But then there has been the physical working condition that has for many years caused the public health sector to struggle, Dr Ramsammy admitted. “No one can doubt that the physical environment in which people worked was no inducement to stay, but we are changing that right now, because the physical environment is being made better and by and large we have resolved that issue.”
There are still some remaining issues, but according to the Minister when the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) in-patient building is finished it will make life a little better.
This year the national budget has catered to the construction, rehabilitation and maintenance of health facilities nationwide, including the new in-patient facility at the GPHC.
With an overall allocation of $13.3 billion to the health sector this year, rehabilitation works will also be extended to the West Demerara Regional Hospital and plans for the expansion of the Skeldon Hospital should come to fruition. Of the budgeted sum an estimated $300M has been allocated to the enhancement of antenatal and child health programmes with specific focus on the prevention of maternal and infant mortality and on child nutrition. This year, $2.7 billion is slated to be spent to acquire drugs and medical supplies for the public health care system.

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