DIX­IE-ANN DICK­SON

As ear­ly as next week, 119 for­eign doc­tors and 450 for­eign nurs­es will be­gin to ar­rive in T&T to work. Par­lia­men­tary Sec­re­tary in the Health Min­istry Wes­ley George said this yes­ter­day dur­ing the grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny of the Op­er­at­ing The­atre Nurs­ing Train­ing Pro­gramme held at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex (EWM­SC) in Mt Hope.

George said the on­ly rea­son for­eign doc­tors and nurs­es were be­ing hired was due to the short­age of lo­cal doc­tors. He said the first batch of doc­tors were com­ing from Cu­ba and would be as­signed to the var­i­ous hos­pi­tals in their var­i­ous spe­cial­ties. He added that the Health Sec­tor did not have suf­fi­cient lo­cals to fill these po­si­tions, but hoped with­in the next five years this would change. George said the Gov­ern­ment had em­barked on dif­fer­ent train­ing ini­tia­tives to as­sist in mak­ing this hap­pen. He not­ed that in ad­di­tion to this year­long The­atre Nurs­ing Train­ing Pro­gramme, the gov­ern­ment has grant­ed schol­ar­ships to na­tion­als and en­tered in­to part­ner­ships with for­eign in­sti­tu­tions to in­crease lo­cal health pro­fes­sion­als' tech­no­log­i­cal ca­pac­i­ty and skills, to be­come bet­ter qual­i­fied.

Echo­ing sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments was the keynote speak­er and board mem­ber of the North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty(NCRHA), Mol­ly Wheel­er, who said there was a na­tion­wide short­age of health pro­fes­sion­als due to mi­gra­tion. Wheel­er said, "Mi­gra­tion has con­tributed to the short­age of health pro­fes­sion­als and it was worse now than in the 90s." She, how­ev­er, en­cour­aged the grad­uands to stay and give back to their coun­try as there was a short­age, es­pe­cial­ly in the area of The­atre Nurs­ing. George as­sured the 23 grad­uands that the Gov­ern­ment was do­ing all it could to im­prove the work­ing con­di­tions.

An­oth­er ini­tia­tive soon to be launched was the Na­tion­al Health Ser­vice (NHS) and the E-Health Card, he said. NHS, he said was a mod­ernised, in­te­grat­ed sys­tem of health de­liv­ery, tied to­geth­er with the E-card, which was an elec­tron­ic card that pro­vid­ed ac­cess to on­line med­ical records, ap­point­ment sched­ul­ing and test records lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. George added this would pro­vide cit­i­zens with an es­sen­tial pack­age of health care ser­vices.