Minister encourages volunteerism in health sector

Dec 08, 2015 News

“Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”
This Chinese proverb was emphasised by Minister of Public Health, Dr. George Norton, recently when he considered the level of training support that is currently forthcoming to the public health sector.

Minister of Public Health, Dr. George Norton

The training which is being offered by an overseas-based charitable organisation is expected to prepare local health professionals at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), to deliver paediatric cardiac care independently.
“This exercise where we are building the capacity of the GPHC to cater to paediatric cardiac patients (is) something that would have been unheard of in times gone by,” said the Minister as he expressed gratitude to the International Children’s Heart Foundation.
“I am grateful…and I would like to promote the training of our personnel: our nurses, paediatricians, anaesthetists and of course our surgeons,” said the Minister, who underscored the complexity of paediatric surgery.
“It is when you visit the team (overseas medical team) and you hear of all who are involved and all the conditions that are necessary, then you realise how complex this whole exercise is,” said the Minister of recent cardiac surgeries conducted at the GPHC.
“When we hear about surgery, we think ‘oh it’s one surgeon who is going to go in there and do some magic’ and that would be the end of it (but) that is not the case,” asserted Minister Norton.
He moreover stated his appreciation that the support being offered will see training of needed professionals including perfusionists, cardiologists and even respiratory therapists, among others, all of whom are necessary to be involved in the cardiac operations in order for them to be successful.
The Public Health Minister made a point of highlighting that the training of the local professionals is being facilitated by the volunteers who represent the majority of the visiting Baby Heart Foundation. The Foundation is a volunteer-driven organisation which offers its services to countries around the world, and has been successful in helping to reduce the cost of paediatric cardiac care.
The Baby Heart Foundation is a not for profit organisation that has been in existence since 1993. The organisation has 22 years of experience in sustainable and independent paediatric cardiac services around the world. It has been able to offer paediatric heart care, through the expertise of mainly volunteer medical practitioners, to 33 countries, and has thus far completed over 7,000 surgeries. Its contributions to these countries has allowed for many of them to eventually offer crucial paediatric services independently.
And it is the hope of the Minister that local professionals could embrace the notion of volunteerism.
Speaking of the recent visiting team that concluded a bout of open heart surgeries at the GPHC, Minister Norton said, “Really and truly, there were only three staff members…we were dealing with 15 volunteers which is a culture we in Guyana need to develop. We have to start to look differently at volunteering”.
According to the Minister, “We have a tendency of looking at the emoluments; how much we are going to work for as a general practitioner, or how much I am going to get as a specialist physician, and we hardly think of how much we can gain as volunteers here especially in the health sector.”