Dental, eye care among over 200 services to be extended to all health centres

Over 200 services will be offered at health centres all across Guyana, Minister of Health Dr Frank Anthony recently revealed. He outlined services such as dental, eye care and hearing care that will be made available at all of these facilities.

Health centres in Guyana are currently only equipped to treat non-emergency patients but this is expected to change over the next few years.

“We have mapped out in the Ministry that we want to do – about 216 different things at each health centre and the staff must be trained to be able to deliver these types of services,” Dr Anthony said during a recent visit to Region Six.

The government has been working to improve the local health care system by extending services that are otherwise only available in the city or coast to all regions.

But with the expansion of these services, Dr Anthony stated that the human resource capacity would also be required to expand. And so, the Ministry plans to train approximately 1000 nurses per year.

“Every year, for nursing we are able to accommodate maybe 200 to 250 people, but we want to start a programme where every year we will take in at least 1000 people,” Dr Anthony related.

He urged community members to assist in highlighting persons with at least five CSEC subjects and who are interested in nursing to sign up for the programme.

“…but to train a nurse it takes three years so what we will be doing is putting the programme online and when you are ready to do the practical, we will bring you in to what will be simulation centres,” Dr Anthony added.

The Health Ministry has also promised to deliver wheelchairs and prostheses to those in need at a reduced cost.

“We are trying to bring down the cost of prosthetics; what we want you to do is to help us find the people who need these kinds of services and we will work with those people to bring down the cost to make sure they can get that arm or leg,” Dr Anthony said.

Already, the Ministry is assisting patients who are on dialysis with $600,000 cheque annually to offset treatment costs.

All patients need to do is register with the Medical Treatment Department of the Ministry of Health and are required to present a medical document from their doctor to validate that they require dialysis treatment.