Occupational Safety & Health Centre of Excellence commissioned in Reg 6

The Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Centre of Excellence was on Friday commissioned at the New Amsterdam Technical Institute (NATI) in Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne).
The 2592-square-foot facility was commissioned by the Greater Guyana Initiative (GGI) in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, the Labour and Manpower Planning Ministry, the Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (CTVET), and LearnCorp International (LCI).
The Centre will support delivery of the Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ) Level Three Diploma in Occupational Safety and Health. It will combine classroom instruction with practical familiarisation in areas including personal protective equipment, gas detection, industrial hygiene, first aid, chemical safety, fall protection, lifting and rigging, confined-space procedures and emergency response.
Importantly, the practical sessions are designed to complement the certificate-level training by providing students with hands-on exposure to equipment, procedures and workplace practices as part of their learning. Students will gain exposure to equipment and procedures across personal protective equipment (PPE); atmospheric monitoring and gas detection; industrial hygiene; first aid, CPR and AEDs; chemical safety, including Globally Harmonised System and Transportation of Dangerous Goods; power-tool use and guards; safety barricades and barriers; fall protection and rescue; scaffold use and safety awareness; lifting and rigging; confined-space entry, monitoring and rescue; and basic firefighting and emergency response.
These areas will help students better understand the safety practices and equipment they may encounter in industrial workplaces, while reinforcing the need for additional formal and site-specific training where required by employers or industry standards. This foundation will better prepare students to complete the CVQ Level Three programme and pursue further competency-based, employer-required and site-specific training relevant to their chosen careers.
The commissioning brought together Government, education, private-sector and international partners around a shared objective: strengthening Guyana’s workforce and building local capacity to support the country’s continued development.
President of ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, Alistair Routledge, stated, “At its core, occupational safety and health is about protecting lives. It is about ensuring that every worker, whether on a construction site, in an office, at a manufacturing facility, within the transportation sector, or offshore, has the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to perform their duties safely and return home to their families each day.” In addition, Education Minister Sonia Parag related, “This success of this training centre will not be measured by the building itself or the equipment in that building. It will be by the training that is administered to those that will be getting into that centre to gain their skillset and their certification.”
Further, Minister Keoma Griffith related that the facility will complement the work of his ministry.
“We have launched a campaign which we have titled ‘Putting Safety First’, and so far, we have gone into every region. We have brought educational awareness symposiums and talks to every region in construction, and this programme we intend to run in every single high-risk sector in this country until everybody approaches safety as a priority. Critically, we must train more people and train them better; this is why today’s commissioning is so important.”
Meanwhile, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of LearnCorp International, Phil Doody, emphasised that “We are not simply opening a world-class safety and health training facility; we are pairing it with a CVQ OSH Level Three Diploma Program, creating an environment for occupational safety and health beyond theory. People can learn, they can practise, they can demonstrate competency, they can make mistakes in controlled learning environments, and they can leave here better prepared to protect themselves and the people working alongside them.”
The Centre expands Guyana’s technical education infrastructure and creates another pathway for Guyanese to develop skills relevant to the country’s evolving economy.