New courses added to IHSE list of post-grad studies offered via GPHC

Jan 26, 2021 News

Amidst pandemic…

Director of IHSE, Dr. Alexandra Harvey.

IHSE post-grad medical students during a training session at the facility.

Kaieteur News – The Institute of Health Science Education (IHSE) at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) has added two new post-grad courses despite faced with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, medical professionals can take advantage of the Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) Masters of Medicine (MMED) and the Neonatal Nursing Bsc. programmes offered via the IHSE.
The programmes are an additional to some 13 other post-grad courses available to doctors and nurses seeking to formally advance their qualifications.
Director of Medical Education at GPHC and Head of the IHSE, Dr. Alexandra Harvey, told Kaieteur News that while the pandemic disrupted some of the classes in terms of how they are conducted, there were no major changes in the school’s annual work programme. Dr. Harvey related that the IHSE had planned to introduce the courses even before the institute was faced with the challenges of the pandemic.
“We had planned to add the courses earlier in the year but after COVID-19 came we had to figure out how to manage the present courses we had running before we introduced the new ones,” she explained.
According to Dr. Harvey, the new courses will help to boost the IHSE’s present capacity to train medical staff.
“Now, we have the Ear Nose and Throat faculty which will basically deal with diseases that affect those areas like tonsillitis; a component of that course will also be surgical and for the nurses we now have the Bachelors of Science programme in neonatal nursing,” the IHSE Head said.
In addition to the two courses, Dr. Harvey told this newspaper that the institute also offers courses in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care (Diploma), Anaesthesia and Intensive Care (MMED), General Surgery (MMED), Orthopaedics and Traumatology (Diploma), Orthopaedics and Traumatology (MMED), Emergency Medicine (MMED), Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases (MMED), Family Medicine MMED, Obstetrics and Gynaecology MMED, Paediatrics (MMED), Psychiatry (MMED), Diagnostic Radiology (MMED) and the Diploma programme in Nurse Anaesthesia.
The IHSE Director explained, however, that due to the pandemic several of the classes have moved to an online platform.
“We did a lot of virtual classes via zoom and whenever there is need for in-house training this is done under strict COVID-19 protocols,” she said.
As a result, Dr. Harvey had reported that 76 medical professionals have successfully completed post-graduate programmes offered by the institute despite the conditions of the pandemic.
The successful post-graduate trainees in the class of 2020 included some 44 doctors and 32 nurses who completed their programmes, despite the pandemic.
Dr. Harvey hailed the 2020 batch of post-grad candidates for their dedication.
According to her, “the team worked hard, maybe even harder than most years to ensure that they successfully completed the work programme.”
She told Kaieteur News too, that a new batch of post-graduate medical students has already started to enroll for a host of specialised health education programmes for the year 2021.
Given its mandate, the IHSE has been hailed for introducing a next-level type of medical education at Guyana’s national health institution. The institute since 2006 has been working closely with the University of Guyana (UG) to provide medical accreditation for the various programmes for doctors and nurses to complete studies there.
Annually, the institute, which is housed in the compound of the GPHC, boasts of providing scores of doctors and nurses with the specialised line of post-graduate medical certificates.