Mt Sinai impressed with pace of Guyana’s health screening programme

…70% of eligible nursery school students screened in less than a year

Two years on from its launch, the partnership between Guyana and the New York-based Mount Sinai Hospital, is one of the driving forces behind the accelerating revamp of healthcare across the country, including expanding healthcare screening of children, all the way to the secondary school level.
The pace at which it is expanding has been described as unprecedented by a Mount Sinai official. During an appearance at the Concordia Annual summit, President Dr Irfaan Ali was joined by Dr Rachel Vreeman, chair of global health and health system design from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and John Hess, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hess Corporation.
Dr Vreeman gave some insight into some of the work her organization has been doing in Guyana, remarking on how impressive it is that the country has been able to expand its healthcare system at such a rapid pace.

“So, in Guyana, they’re starting every year to provide each school going child with a full health exam. Checking their vision, their hearing, looking for dental issues. Looking for learning delays, challenges with their growth. And then creating the referrals and connections, so that right there in that community if there is an issue detected, each family gets connected to the services that are needed.”
“Whether that’s glasses, dental care. And in less than a year, they’ve managed to screen 70 per cent of the eligible nursery school students. That’s an incredible feat, I’ve been working in child health globally for more than 20 years. I’ve never seen a programme scale up across an entire country like this so quickly,” Dr. Vreeman said.
Dr. Vreeman, a pediatrician by training with experience in global health, remarked that in most countries children do not get routine, government sponsored health screenings done once they’ve passed the baby stage.
“In less than a year, the government of Guyana has launched a school-based health screening programme nationally. They started with the nursery school students, the three- to five-year-olds. Typically, there hasn’t been a place and Guyana is not unique in this, for children to get routine evaluations or screenings after they are babies and finish their first set of shots,” Dr. Vreeman explained.
She noted that Mount Sinai is also partnering with the government in areas that range from workforce training to developing a robust data and health information system. This would enhance the efforts by the government to make healthcare more decentralized and community based.
“We do have work going on with the government of Guyana and the Ministry of Health, in a number of different areas all at once. From work force training and development to the continued development of the data science and health information systems… everything from the IT specialists to the clinical informatic, so you can really set the strategy for the country with that.”
“We are truly working with the government systems to transform the system, along the lines of President Ali’s vision. It has not been the case previously that there would be the capacity in every community to get, say, screening for diabetes or high blood pressure or be able to access some of those basic medicines and services you might need. Might be required to travel into the capital, maybe have to take several hours journey to even get monthly diabetes medicines for example.”
Dr Vreeman expressed her excitement to move on to the next phase of the health screening programme, that is the primary school screening phase for children between the ages of six to 12 or 13. From there, the plan is to move to secondary school phase.
“So more and more we’ve been a partner to the Ministry of Health in their efforts to bring whatever level of services we can, right to the community where people are. And then really free up the national hospital and continue to improve their ability to provide specialty care for when you really do need to be at that National hospital level.”
Last year, the Comprehensive Child and Youth Health Programme commenced with nursery school children being screened for oral, hearing and vision health defects. At one point, hundreds of health issues were detected after the Health Ministry would have screened 5600 students during pre-school screening. (G8)