Regional hospitals to be completed by 2nd quarter of 2025 – Health Minister

… says facilities will be staffed with local, foreign professionals

As the government pushes aggressively to improve healthcare infrastructure within the country, Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony announced that all six regional hospitals that are currently under construction are expected to be completed by the end of the second quarter of 2025.
Minister Anthony made this announcement on Tuesday during the Health Ministry’s year-end press briefing. The minister highlighted that the ministry plans to commission the Lima, De Kinderen, Diamond, Bath, Enmore and Number 75 Regional Hospitals by June.
“As you know we have been working on doing the Lima, De Kinderen, Number 75, Diamond, Bath and Enmore regional hospitals. All of these would be completed earlier next year and we’re hoping that they can be commissioned before June 2025, so that’s the plan that we’re working on.”

The minister also highlighted that in 2024 the ministry began the construction of new nursing schools and these facilities should be also completed this year.
“This year we have also started the construction of two nursing schools on is at New Amsterdam and one at Suddie and we expect that by next year (2025) these nursing schools will be substantially completed.”
Moreover, as the ministry continues to expand its services and improve infrastructure, human resources has been a major concern circulating around the healthcare sector expansion. In an effort to clear the air Dr Anthony highlighted that the health ministry in collaboration with several stakeholders such as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has been working to address this issue.
He further revealed that the ministry has developed a staffing plan to not only address the expansion of the country’s health sector but to also combat the issue of migration among healthcare professionals.
“We have worked with for example PAHO and we have done a staffing plan of how many people we would need to address some of the migration that we have and also to address the expansion that we are doing.”
“For each of the new regional hospitals for example, we have quantified how many people we need… so we have how many specialists, how many registrars, how many GMOs, how many nurses, how many midwives etc all of it we have quantified.”

Moreover, the minister added that the ministry has also significantly increased the number of persons being trained per year, however with the average time to properly train health professionals such as nurses being three (3) years. Minister Anthony highlighted that in the interim the ministry will employ health professionals from other countries to complement the local workforce.
“We have been working to train persons locally to be able to meet those demands, that is why we have started this hybrid programme and through this programme we have been able to enrol at least 1100 persons in the first batch. This year we took in another 1000 persons and next year we will take in another 1000 or so.”
“We will start seeing those persons by 2026, and most of them would start graduating by 2026 while we wait on those persons to graduate and we continue to train and so forth we will have a gap and, in that interim, we will have to look at how we can fill those gaps and that would include bringing people from abroad to fill those gaps.”
Meanwhile, in 2024, the government sought to train more nurses, build more modern health facilities and tackle chronic diseases that affect thousands of people annually. Guyana’s public health sector received a whopping $129.8 billion budgetary allocation, the largest budgetary allocation ever for the sector.
Out of this budget, $10.3 billion was allocated towards the paediatric and maternal hospital at Ogle.
Another $15.5 billion was allocated for the construction of six regional hospitals at Bath, De Kindren, Diamond, Enmore, Lima and the No. 75 Village.