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Eight nurses undergoing mental health training

Mar 10, 2011 News

– As part of Health Ministry’s quest to improve psychiatric care

In an attempt to fulfil a promise to bolster the mental health capacity of the public health system, eight nurses are being trained in the area of psychiatry through an initiative undertaken through the collaborative efforts of the Minister of Health and the Dalhousie University and Ministry of Health of Nova Scotia, Canada.
Minister of Health, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, revealed yesterday that the nurses have been engaged in intense training since last month at the New Amsterdam Hospital.
The training, he said, is characterised by a combination of distance learning and in-class supervised sessions. He explained that the nurses are provided with a series of lessons which they are tasked with internalising ahead of lecture sessions.
“Most of the day they are engaged in reading literature provided to them; then they are exposed to lectures via conferencing with the overseas-based tutors.” In addition they are given an opportunity to gain a hands-on feel of the wards, the Minister revealed, adding that every few months nurses from the Canadian Ministry of Health travel to Guyana to supervise the wards. A team is expected here on March 22, he said.
The training is expected to continue until January at which point the eight nurses will graduate as certified mental health professionals equipped with the relevant skills and knowledge to deliver mental health service.
The first nine months of the programme, according to Minister Ramsammy, is designed to ensure that the nurses are theoretically prepared for the following three months which will entail them operating on a full-time basis on the wards.
As part of their training, too, the nurses are tasked with keeping logs of what they do on a daily basis.
“The nurses have indicated that the training is much more than they had anticipated. The whole process is very innovative and we will continue this even after these nurses would have completed this training programme.
“We are thinking about using this same training model not just for the mental health nurses but for other level of workers as well,” the Minister disclosed yesterday.
It was during the latter part of last year that the Minister had said that there are merely four psychiatrists operating locally, an amount he had deemed grossly insufficient to deal with mental health cases arising among the 750,000 odd Guyanese-population.
This assertion was made by the Minister as he addressed a gathering to mark the global observance of World Suicide Prevention Day last year. “We live in a global environment where the number of psychiatrists is insufficient in every single country…There is not a single country in the Caribbean that has enough psychiatrists but then that statement can be extended to every country in the world.
Even the United States and Canada are trying to recruit more psychiatrists,” the Minister had revealed.
However, he said that the issue of mental health is not simply one that can be dealt with simply by psychiatrists alone. He added that the public health sector had been looking at its quota of psychiatric nurses. “When Minister (Gail) Teixeira was here, eight persons, not in a formal programme, but they were trained to function as psychiatric nurses.”
In Belize, the Minister said, mental health services are delivered by psychiatric nurses and not just psychiatrists as is the expected trend in some countries.
“We were in fact trying to emulate the Belizean system when we trained those nurses…” But though the local health sector had gained some success having trained the initial batch of psychiatric nurse, it is to date only receiving the service of one of the nurses trained then.
According to Dr Ramsammy two of those trained nurses have since migrated to the Caribbean, four have moved onto the United Kingdom and one is currently in the United States.
Minister Ramsammy added that since that initial training there has been no further training for nurses in the field of psychiatry until now.

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