Ms. Volda Lawrence, the Minister of Public Health, when speaking to a gathering of overseas Guyanese in the United States last week, stated that Guyana and Caribbean countries should stop complaining about the impact of the brain drain of nurses. Instead, she intends to train nurses from both places for the international nursing marketplace, largely because this is likely to increase foreign exchange remittances. ‘I said to them,’ she said, ‘that this is not something to complain [about]. You got to fix it. If they want our people, let us train them and send them out so we could get forty Western Unions in our countries instead of ten; so that we can exchange human resources and get back the monies into our country. We have to find a way; we just can’t complain’ (http://demerarawaves.com/2018/09/26/).
There is no doubt that the Ministry of Public Health, like the Ministry of Education and all sectors in Guyana, faces a real problem of how to acquire professionals but more specifically of how to retain those that are trained with the scarce resources of the Guyanese people. As a result, it could be argued that other sectors, but particularly education/teaching in which there is also a significant brain drain, could be treated as the minister suggested. What is certain, however, is that encouraging migration is not ‘fixing’ the problem of retaining nurses, which one would have thought should have been her main concern. The minister is merely attempting to exploit the inevitable for the national good and I would have no difficulty with that approach if it was necessary and not likely to bring additional negative consequences.
