Health workers to consider neonatal screening for early detection, treatment of ailments in children

Sep 04, 2023 News

Kaieteur News- Neonatal screening helps doctors diagnose babies quickly and start treatment as soon as possible. With a simple blood test, doctors can check for rare genetic, hormone-related, or metabolic conditions that can cause serious health problems later in life.

To this end, Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony underscored the importance of early screening at the Neonatal Health Conference which was hosted at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC) on Sunday. The two-day conference is being held in collaboration with the Guyana Health to Kids Organisation.

The Health Minister told the gathering of medical professionals at ACCC that: “the purpose of the screening is to address some of the challenges and health conditions that some of these young ones face. For our neonatal population, we may be finding diseases that go undetected, or we will be detecting it at a later stage when it might

Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony.

be more difficult to deal with.”

He noted while Guyana does not offer this type of screening now “at some point, we need to offer some form of neonatal screening; so we will have to look at what those tests should look like. How many we should be doing? And what would be the effectiveness of the tests?”

Dr. Anthony revealed that the Ministry of Health is already implementing a similar programme. “We started a programme about two months ago in which we screened school-aged children, about 5600 of them at the nursery level. Already, we have detected that, among them, more than 500 of them have various types of health challenges which we are now working to rectify. Our intention is to at least screen by the end of the year, the 27,000 children that we have at the nursery level,” he said.

Dr. Anthony noted the need to train professionals to manage the new type of healthcare service.

“If we are going to make Guyana a hub for medicine, it has to start with all of us here. We need people to be professional and to set the right tone in the facilities in which they work.”

He stressed that Guyana is on a trajectory to develop its health sector to become one of the best in the Caribbean.

“We are building infrastructure so we will soon see a time when we will be a regional hub where children who need specialized services will be able to get those services here,” he said in reference to the new maternal and pediatric hospital that is slated for opening in 2025.

“As you know right now, we have challenged patients who need paediatric cardiac services, but we have restarted the programme, where we are able to do some cardiac surgeries at the Georgetown Public Hospital but that sometimes can still be a challenge. With the new facility, we will be able to do much more because we have set aside a special suite to do paediatric surgeries and we have a team of persons that are being trained to be able to manage those patients,” the Minister of Health explained.

Dr. Anthony said too that his agency has been intentional about the strategy to train and retain medical professionals.

“As you are aware, we have some challenges in keeping nurses in the system…That is why earlier this year, we made an attempt to improve salaries so that hopefully that will help create retention, so now you will find the clinical staff working within the Ministry of Health received increases on their salaries.”

“Now, you will find anyone who has a clinical background and is working in the Ministry has a salary that starts at 100,000; for doctors, their salary starts at $460,000 and that can go up to $1,000,000 for consultants,’’ he disclosed.

In addition to the raising of salaries, Dr. Anthony said that the Ministry has been engaging a number of institutions to offer advanced training to doctors and other medical professionals.

“For doctors, we have been working in offering postgraduate training and a number of fellowships…When I talk about us transforming the healthcare system, there is a range of things that we are doing and one of the things we have a focus on is ensuring our babies are well taken care of,” he added.

A section of the gathering of medical professionals at ACCC on Sunday

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Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC), Dr. Frank Anthony, Neonata

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