Gov’t to roll out a number of health sector training courses – Minister Anthony

With enough resources available this year to further develop human resources in the health sector, Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, M.P., on Friday said the ministry will be rolling out a number of training courses for persons desirous of pursuing careers in the field of health.

“There are lots of training that would become available this year, so for community health workers we’ll be running several community health training, new courses to train community health workers and these courses will be done in the regions,” Dr. Anthony said.

Training will also be offered in pharmacy and laboratory aids programmes. The minister said the training is ‘absolutely essential for diagnosis especially in the rural communities.’

Additionally, this year, the health ministry will be rolling out a number of new nursing courses at the Georgetown, New Amsterdam and Linden nursing schools.

Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony said the ministry can now offer training for bio-medical technicians. The training will be offered in collaboration with International bio-medical aid, an international non-governmental organisation.

“We intend to train about 40 persons using this organisation, and once trained they will be able to do maintenance of a lot of the equipment that we have in the surgical theaters.”

Further, medex and dentex training will also be continuing this year with a new cohort of students added to these programmes.

“For medical doctors, post-grad training…we’ve now open up opportunities in Cuba, with UWI, in Canada, in the USA and of course we have our local post-graduate institute, so during the year a number of persons would be sent overseas for specialised training,” Dr. Anthony said.