Ali­cia Llanos

?Health Min­is­ter Jer­ry Narace has wel­comed the sec­ond batch of Cuban health care pro­fes­sion­als to T&T, as part of the min­istry's com­mit­ment to ad­dress the short­age of lo­cal health care pro­fes­sion­als and the in­creas­ing health care needs of cit­i­zens. Narace spoke yes­ter­day at the of­fi­cial Ori­en­ta­tion Pro­gramme for the Health Care Pro­fes­sion­als at Cas­ca­dia Ho­tel and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, St Ann's. It was held to in­tro­duce the sec­ond batch of Cuban health care pro­fes­sion­als to the med­ical prac­tices and tra­di­tions in T&T. The batch–45 in to­tal–con­sist­ed of 28 nurs­es and 17 doc­tors.

Of the 17 doc­tors, 13 are pri­ma­ry care physi­cians and four are spe­cial­ist med­ical of­fi­cers, spe­cial­is­ing in ear, nose and throat surgery, neu­ro­surgery, in­ter­nal med­i­cine and in­ten­sive care med­i­cine.

Join­ing the Cubans were 13 nurs­es from St Vin­cent and the Grenadines. Narace said it was through strong Cari­com ties the ex­change was made pos­si­ble. In his ad­dress at the ori­en­ta­tion, Narace said the re­cruit­ment of for­eign health care pro­fes­sion­als had been part of Cab­i­net-ap­proved plan of the Min­istry of Health to re­cruit 450 for­eign nurs­es and 119 for­eign doc­tors on con­tract to ad­dress the med­ical per­son­al short­age. He said: "We (the Min­istry of Health) ful­ly recog­nise that this is an in­ter­im mea­sure to re­spond to the in­creas­ing health care needs of our cit­i­zen­ry." Narace said apart from re­cruit­ing for­eign pro­fes­sion­als the min­istry was in­vest­ing in the train­ing of lo­cal per­son­nel. This is be­ing done, he said, through the ex­pand­ed med­ical school in­take at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine, and sev­er­al schol­ar­ship pro­grammes.

Narace said in 2004 the Gov­ern­ment grant­ed 124 schol­ar­ship to the St George's Med­ical School in Grena­da. In ad­di­tion to in­crease med­ical school in­take and schol­ar­ship, he said Cab­i­net agreed to in­crease med­ical in­tern­ships from 76 to 176. He said in the field of nurs­ing sev­er­al ba­sic and post-ba­sic nurs­ing pro­grammes had been im­ple­ment­ed, with 1,510 nurs­es en­rolled. Narace said in this fis­cal year the min­istry planned to pur­sue ini­tia­tives to cre­ate and car­ry out a health care needs as­sess­ment for T&T, which would iden­ti­fy and pri­ori­tise the cur­rent and project health care needs of the pop­u­la­tion. An­oth­er ini­tia­tive be­ing ex­plored was the de­vel­op­ment of a man­pow­er plan­ning frame­work for the health sec­tor, which would al­low the min­istry to for­mu­late ef­fec­tive strate­gies to en­sure there was ad­e­quate med­ical per­son­nel to treat with the needs of the pop­u­la­tion.