Mental health services to be extended beyond National Psychiatric Hospital – Ramsaran

Feb 11, 2013 News

By Leon Suseran
Minister of Health, Dr. Bheri Ramsaran is hoping to extend mental health services and treatment beyond the doors of the National Psychiatric Hospital (NPH), into the various communities across Guyana, especially through the health centres.
“We want to bring mental health down to the primary health care level,” he stated.
Ramsaran is hoping that persons seeking mental health treatment can access those treatments within their own communities first before having to move to higher levels of treatment provided by the NPH in Berbice. Some health centres, he boasted, are now equipped with trained psychiatric nurses.
The NPH, he stated, should deal with only very serious cases.
“So, we manage them [mental health cases] before they reach the stage of the Psychiatric Ward.”
He noted, too, that there is a partnership with the Dalhousie University in India, along with a consultant here in Guyana “who is giving us certain advice for us to push this project.”
The Health Minister stressed the importance of training more Psychiatric Nurses to send out to the various health centres, “so when the first signs of the disease are seen, they (health workers) are able to pick it up easy and manage it.”
The Minister added that recently there was an advertisement in the media for more psychiatric nurses.
Usually, he stated, the psychiatric patients are intimidated and “even the doctors or nurses, who are not trained, so we want to train these nurses at the primary health care levels and the Regional and District Hospitals …to interface quickly with the family and the psychiatric patients.”
Fifteen per cent of the world population suffers from mental issues, and four per cent of people, at any one time in the world, would have had some mental issues.
Dr. Bhiro Harry, he stated, has been the National Psychiatrist and has been tasked with furthering the mental health initiatives of training more Psychiatric Nurses.
On the issue of suicides, Dr. Ramsaran noted that there have been “some negative trends in suicides incidents.”
He mentioned Region One which has seen an increase in suicides. He talked about the “high profile case” whereby a young man committed suicide after “severely wounding his girlfriend—a teenager…so we are looking at that to find out what is the cause of the suicide, especially among the Amerindian youth of Region One”.
The Ministry of Health is also reaching out to vulnerable communities, like the prison population.
“We are hoping that, with the advent of more and more doctors, to send some of them into the prisons and to have our nurses specially trained to go to the prisons…we have already got a small batch of them to the prisons and there is still some resistance, so we need to work with the nurses and the nursing schools to create a prison-nursing module.” Hopefully the prisoners, he said, would be treated more humanely.
“We are recognizing as Guyanese citizens, they are human beings, and I think that is a significant thing because we need to live up to some of the conventions that we (Guyana) have signed on to.”
The Health Ministry is also partnering with corporate entities and taking health services directly to those workplaces.