Georgetown: Although poised for immense improvement in the area of emergency medicine care, there is yet need for grave enhancement in the ambulatory service offered by the public health sector. This disclosure was amplified on Tuesday during a Rotary Club of Georgetown press briefing which was aimed at unveiling a project to train 25 public health nurses as Emergency Medicine Technicians.
Speaking to the need for an improved ambulatory care service, Kit Nacimento, who chaired the forum, said that “obviously it needs a great deal of enhancing,” even as he pointed to the fact that while the training project is aimed at training persons who man ambulances, “the infrastructure is poor and it needs help; we don’t have nearly as many ambulances as we would like to have in the country and that is a big problem.”
“I don’t know if Rotary could address this but it is possible that Rotary can start a project which could perhaps provide an ambulance…but those are very big projects which may be out of the range of Rotary,” he said, adding that “the service right now is not good and needs improving.”
The training project which commenced Monday and is expected to conclude tomorrow is being undertaken through the collaborative effort of the Rotary Club, the Ministry of Health and the Paul Gallagher founded Global Emergency Medicine Initiative (GEMINI), which has as its mission to improve the quality of emergency medicine in developing countries.
The project is valued at some US$46,500.
GEMINI since Monday has been facilitating the training session but according to Gallagher “we are not able to do the master projects, they have to come from the Government…” He explained that after the GEMINI recruited doctors came to Guyana and met officials from the Ministry of Health and the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation, the project that was defined was finite. In this regard, he noted that the focus was to train persons specifically in the area of emergency medicine skills. “We expect and intend to accomplish this, we don’t know to what scope but at the end we would have put teaching skills and emergency medicine skills into many people’s heads and hands and that is a tool that hopefully would be used as part of larger projects…The Rotoary Club is fantastic in the projects that it does and perhaps it could provide an ambulance but an ambulance service is what is needed… and while it may need improvement it is not in the scope of our project,” Gallagher asserted.
However, Dr. Ovid Fraser, who had been affiliated with GEMINI over the years, pointed out that while an ambulance service is essential, the most difficult aspect and the most difficult thing to achieve are the human skills. “Ambulances are things that can be bought and inputed into the system at any point but if you have ambulances and you don’t have the technical skills to run the service there is the bottle neck so we are hoping that at least we will have a core of knowledge that becomes a Guyanese possession and this will always be here for when the ambulances are bought,” he stressed.
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