Eleven nurses head to UK for critical-care training
Published:Monday | October 29, 2018 | 12:00 AMPaul Clarke/Gleaner Writer
The success of the Critical Care Nursing Programme could be a template for similar programmes being developed to address the shortage of specialist nurses in other areas of the sector, Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton has posited.
He was addressing the opening ceremony for the Ministry of Health United Kingdom (UK) Bilateral Critical Care Training Programme yesterday at the Kingston Public Hospital, where he gave the charge to 11 student nurses who will do part of their training at the Leeds Hospital in West Yorkshire, England.
The student nurses will undergo one year of training, spending seven months in Jamaica and the remaining time in the UK. The programme will be led by facilitators from Jamaica and the UK.
According to Tufton, the number of medical areas that could benefit from a similar arrangement in the future include accident and emergency, nephrology, and oncology, which are among eight categories of specialist nursing.
WIN-WIN FOR BOTH COUNTRIES
"The fact is that we really need to expand training in all of them, to remedy the different levels of shortages that we now have," Tufton said.
This cohort of nurses follows on the heels of 18 others who spent two months in a clinical rotation in Beijing, China, as part of a memorandum of understanding to see critical-care training taking place between Jamaica and that country.
"It is a win-win for both countries. Both partners benefit, because the nurses give service while they train; so in the case of the UK, they will spend five months at the Leeds Hospital [where] they will work and get trained," Tufton noted. "So we are looking to partner in what we can to create this synergy, and these two cases, China and the UK, is a start of a process that could mean a lot more once we do it right."
According to the health minister, a report on the level of success of the programme will be generated at the end of the rotations and taken to the World Health Organisation for analysis, which will be used to generate a model for other nations.
He said his ministry recently joined up with an entity with a branch just formed here named Nurses Now, led by Lord [Edmund Nigel Ramsay] Crisp of the House of Lords in the UK, an entity that is used to further the agenda for nurses globally.