MoH, US partner to strengthen Guyana’s response to pandemics

The Government through the Health Ministry has forged a new partnership with the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) that will see more healthcare workers benefiting from specialized training.
This initiative aims to bolster Guyana’s clinical capability to manage life-threatening events and to develop its capacity to properly examine disease outbreaks as well as to better respond to epidemics and pandemics.
Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony during an interview with the Guyana Times explained that the training will be conducted in Guyana and overseas.
“This is a new partnership… so maybe in the next couple of months, we’ll have people going out for training. They’ll be doing, there are different types of fellowships that the CDC would offer. I think in the first instance, we’re doing maybe like a three year and then after that you know maybe look at renewing it. This is also building on work that we would have done independently,” Dr Anthony stated.
Further, through Guyana’s partnership with the CDC, the Health Ministry will develop a Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) Action plan.
PHEM is a comprehensive discipline focused on anticipating, mitigating, planning for, responding to, and recovering from all types of public health emergencies (PHE).

About two weeks ago, the Deputy Director for Strategy and Science and the CDC Division of Emergency Operations (DEO) visited Guyana to conduct an external evaluation of the plan.
Whilst here, the team also conducted a workshop with technical stakeholders to discuss PHEM, evaluate Guyana’s current PHEM programme, and lay the foundation for the Action plan.
According to Dr Anthony, the plan will outline a roadmap for training and technical assistance to develop, improve, or sustain Guyana’s PHEM programme.
“The public health emergency plan is really to assess our capacity to respond to emergencies such as if you have an outbreak of a particular disease, what you need to do, what capacity you need to have, the types of people that you should have in a response team. They should have the technical capability of going out there assessing and then helping us to respond most appropriately so, we have started with this workshop,” the Minister explained.
Dr Anthony added that the action plan will beef up security and decrease the spread of infections.
“So, all of this now has fed into a plan for the country to deal with health security. So, we know where we have some challenges and we’re working to strengthen those. Every year in the budget we add monies into the budget so that we can respond to these things, build better labs, have more people trained, put them not just to the central level but to the regional level, build stronger surveillance systems for diseases,” he added.