Environmental Health specialisations added to UG’s curriculum

The School of Allied Health, College of Medical Science at the University of Guyana has now advanced its sweep of academical pursuits, offering four more scopes at the Bachelor’s Degree level.
The School of Allied Health now presents the opportunity for students to pursue a first degree in Environmental Health, with four concentrations; namely Food Safety, Occupational Health and Safety, Environmental Engineering and Vector Control.
Vice Chancellor of UG, Professor Paloma Mohamed said the introduction of such programmes forms part of the institution’s wider goal and fits into its blueprint of solving some of the country’s key problems in the education sector.
“Guyana’s global planetary importance is becoming more and more internationally accepted and nationally focused upon. When we spoke about that second aspirational goal of UG helping to solve these grand challenges, we had isolated eight areas. Interestingly enough, you have several of them kind of articulated in the way the Environmental Health programme with these four specialisations has been addressed,” she told the panel on during Monday’s launch.
Particularly, she noted that the Food Safety specialisation comes at a time when the University is placing increased emphasis on agriculture and aquaculture. Moreover, an institute for Food and Nutrition Safety is being created under the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry.
“We wanted to focus our technical capacity on agri and aquaculture because we know that food safety is one of the biggest threats to mankind now in the world. More people die of hunger in the world than they die of certain diseases and this is not something that we focus upon a great deal. The question of food safety and that BSc in Food Safety is very important. It dovetails very nicely with this new institute that we’re standing up now and that’s the Institute for Food and Nutrition Safety.”
Meanwhile, Director of the School of Allied Health, Dr Davon Van-veed assured that more programmes will be developed in the near future to add to their current assortment.
“We started out as just a few courses offered by the Department of Biology, Faculty of Natural Sciences and look at us. In 2021, we’re a whole college with six scopes. And I can assure you, we’re not finished growing or advancing the school or the college.”
Dean of the UG’s College of Medical Sciences, Dr Cecil Boston outlined that a 2019 meeting in Jamaica saw several specialised persons around the world sharing their input on standardising environmental education, which was used in the crafting of these specialisations locally.
“Environmental health practitioners from across the Caribbean and around the world met to discuss how we standardise environmental education. This was done in collaboration with PAHO and it basically focused on how we standardise environmental health education and how we make it a bit more focused in dealing with the environmental determinants and threats to health, looking at how we tie climate change and environmental health together…What we have here is four comprehensive programmes that would meet all the academic standards that are necessary for whichever pathway is chosen by students,” Dr Boston detailed. (G12)