500 nursery-aged children detected with health issues during pre-school screening – Dr Anthony

…mulls neonatal screening

As Government continues to screen school-aged children across the country, Health Minister Dr Frank Anothony disclosed that several hundred kids in the nursery school level have been diagnosed with various health issues.
Through its School Health Screening Drive, the Health Ministry is aiming to screen at least 27,000 nursery-level children by the ending of the year.
The Comprehensive Child and Youth Health Programme (CYHP) commenced two months ago and facilitates oral health, hearing and vision screening for children and adolescents in schools, ages 5 to 17. This screening initiative is a collaboration between the Health Ministry, the Education Ministry and United States-based Mount Sinai Health Systems.
“We’ve completed about 5600 students at the nursery level and already we’ve detected among them, more than 500 of them would have had various challenges which we are now working to rectify,” Dr Anthony announced on Saturday.
Only Saturday, the ministry hosted its latest screening exercise in Region Two (Pomeroon-Supenaam) where nursery school year one students benefitted from free eye testing and dental check-ups.
The health minister was at the time addressing the opening of the two-day Neonatal Conference held at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC) at Liliendaal, Greater Georgetown. The theme was: “Sustaining Guyana’s Future Through Neonatal Education and Teamwork.”
During his remarks, Dr Anthony informed of the successes of the screening of school-aged children and used the opportunity to encourage stakeholders at the Conference to consider and discuss the introduction neonatal screening.
“So, the [nursery] screening is yielding some of the challenges that this age group face and I’m sure that if we do a similar thing for the neonatal population, we might be finding diseases that go undetected or we’re detecting them at a later stage when it might be more difficult to intervene,” the minister pointed out.
According to Dr Anthony, Government is committed to transforming the healthcare system to ensure babies are well taken care of. He noted that that Guyana has come a long way in having its infant mortality rate reduced, which is as a result of the work that government has put in across the country to identify some of the neonatal-related challenges early and have them rectified.

Room for improvement
However, the health minister stated “There is still a lot of room for improvement because when we look at regional numbers, there are some regions that do better than others and if we’re going to lift the standards then in every region, we must improve the services that we’re offering.”
In order to achieve this, Minister Anthony explained that all stakeholders in the health fraternity need to be onboard and support the various initiatives Government is undertaking. He said persons in the health sector need to take their roles serious and give their best if the country is to become the hub for medicine in the Caribbean region.
“If we’re going to make Guyana one of the best healthcare systems, then it starts with all of us here. Everyone of you will have to up your game. We need people to be more professionally responsible. We also need people to set the right tone in the facilities in which they work,” he stated.
Dr Anthony disclosed that while there are some persons in this sector who work very hard, his Ministry is aware of others who show up but do not put in the same effort at public health institutions but instead, channel their energies into private practice. He noted that this is something that the Health Ministry is paying keen attention to since it impacts on the delivery of improved services in the public healthcare system.
“If it is that people don’t want to work in the public system, that’s okay. You can go and find other employment in the Guyana. But if you’re gonna be working in the public system then we expect people to work properly. All of us are invested in this because we want to see a better healthcare system for our citizens and therefore, we need to put our best foot forward. And with all the investments that we are making, we want to see that transformation,” the minister stated.

Paediatric and Maternal Hospital
Among the initiatives that government has undertaken to enhance neonatal care in Guyana is the construction of a €149 million Paediatric and Maternal Hospital at Goedverwagting, East Coast Demerara. The project is financed by the United Kingdom’s export credit agency – UK Export Finance (UKEF) and is being executed by Austrian-based VAMED Engineering, one of the world’s leaders in delivering healthcare projects.
During his address on Saturday, Dr Anthony revealed that construction of this state-of-the-art and modern hospital in on track to meet its 2025 deadline with piling driving currently ongoing.
Sporting a 256-bed capacity, the hospital will be a referral centre for women and children. It will specialise in maternal, neonatal, and paediatric care with a huge imaging suite for services such as CT scans and MRIs, a modern laboratory, and surgical suites.
The two-day Neonatal Conference was hosted by the Ministry of Health in collaboration with the Giving Health to Kids Organisation (GHTK) to further develop Neonatal Services in Guyana through Education and Training.
GHTK has been working in Guyana for about 15 years and was instrumental in effecting building out neonatology in the country. (G8)