GPHC training second batch of Critical Care Nurses

May 20, 2014 News

– as anticipated accreditation of programme nears

A batch of 14 nurses from various hospitals is currently students of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC’)s Critical Care Nursing Programme. This is the second batch of nurses to undertake the programme which was first introduced in 2011 with

GPHC’s Assistant Director of Nursing, Brother Owen John

18 nurses in training.
All of the trained nurses are still functional in the public health system while one has since started pursuing further training in Medicine.
The new batch was not taken on board until this year, since according to Coordinator of the Programme, Assistant Director of Nursing Brother Owen John, “we didn’t have the kind of Faculty we needed because we were depending mainly on an overseas Faculty.” However, this time around, he noted that the continuance of the programme will not be dependent only on an overseas Faculty. According to him the programme is currently being facilitated by some overseas experts and some local professionals, particularly doctors, who are being utilised as clinical instructors.
The ongoing programme entails ‘Problem-based’ learning where the nurses in training are given assignments and are tasked with doing extensive research. They are also required to undergo supervised tutorial sessions, a move, John said, that is a mechanism to help them learn better.
According to him, the primary reason for the implementation of the Critical Care Nursing Programme was to embrace moves towards nurses’ specialisation even as he pointed out that “there has been a lot of movement in health care.”
According to him since doctors are known to operate at a higher level when they specialise in a particular area it is therefore expected that nurses would seek to match this higher level of operation. “Now if you have a nurse that’s three years on the job, she is not a specialist nurse; she does not understand certain things because she is trained to give basic nursing care,” said John.
He however noted that a Critical Care Nurse on the other hand is trained to function in a number of the specialty areas of nursing and therefore possess a high level of nursing skills.
The 15-month long Critical Care Nursing programme commenced on July 25, 2011 with a view of bolstering not only the ethical skills of the nurses but also training them to deal with patients with cardiovascular, pulmonary and neurological disorders.
The programme has however not been accredited by the Guyana Nursing Council.
According to John there have been some concerns highlighted by the Council regarding the programme. He is however optimistic that “hopefully we will be able to get it done soon…the Council said that we have to run several of these programmes and following Peer Reviews it (Council) will reconsider accrediting it.”

Some of the Nurses in training.

In addition to introducing the Critical Care Nursing Programme, John noted that the GPHC has also been answering calls to have specialist trained nurses by embracing a Neonatal Nursing Specialist Programme. A number of other nurses, he said, have also been specially trained to function in the Burn Care Unit, the Accident and Emergency Unit and are very capable to help care for trauma cases.
Added to this, John noted that “we are currently thinking about running a special programme for nurses to be trained to deal with spinal cord injuries…We want to run a short programme perhaps three or four months long.”
“We are looking to do a number of things but it calls for a lot of planning and you have to really sell these programmes because there is always a bit of resistance,” John confided.