With a focus on its physicians being trained in tropical medicine to better able serve Guyanese specifically living in New York, US, Northwell Health—that state’s largest health care provider—has dispatched its first batch of medical residents to Guyana to work at the Georgetown Public Hospital.
This is according to a press release from Northwell Health which said that the medical partnership is an initiative to have the residents rotate at the public hospital to enhance care and develop cultural understanding and training in tropical medicine.
The release said that the partnership aims to address disparities in Guyana, by supporting and enhancing a variety of services, which conversely seeks to address disparities in New York by broadening cross-cultural understanding with the communities of Little Guyana in Queens – as well as surrounding neighbourhoods that make up the fifth largest immigrant population in the city of New York.
Addressing health equity at home also means addressing the health care needs abroad,” the release quotes Dr. Eric Cioe Peña, Northwell’s director of the Center for Global Health (CGH) as saying while adding that medical education is also about understanding “your patients, their culture and value systems.”
According to the release, Dr. Cioe Peña went on to say “All of this comes with trust and showing our surrounding communities, that have become increasingly diverse, that Northwell understands their cultural needs and what’s important to them. This partnership is a win-win by strengthening Guyana’s health system and secondly, strengthening Northwell’s relationship with the people of Guyana and Little Guyana.”
The first set of Northwell medical residents arrived in Guyana last week.
In expanding on what is intended to be a five-year plan, the release said that after an initial needs assessment in Novem-ber of last year, Minister of Health Dr. Frank Anthony invited the CGH to return Guyana to assess its interior regions to provide a strategy to improve the welfare of the people living in the more remote areas.
Noting that patients in such locations who require care in Georgetown, sometimes have to travel to the capital for multiple days by ATV, boat, or in more dire cases, getting there in a “small fixed wing aircraft,” the release said that the CGH looks to bolster Guyana’s secondary-care system to enhance care in those regions.
“We’re looking at ways to leverage Northwell’s robust telemedicine platforms that allowed us to provide care during the pandemic,” Dr. Cioe Peña explained; while adding that “these systems can directly connect with advanced clinicians at GPHC to offer additional support.
The release said he explained that there is also partnership with Northwell’s Center for Emer-gency Medical Services about pre-hospital transport in the jungle; so that “when patients need to come to GPHC for complex services and imaging, they can transport them quickly and efficiently to a tertiary-level care, quickly, efficiently and safely.”
Dr. Cioe Peña went on to say, “We also have to make sure we’re treating people in that secondary hospital – that generally consists of one emergency room bay and one operating room – and have those physicians’ practice at their highest level of their license.”
The three-week visit back in November the release said, included meetings with President Irfaan Ali, to finalize the five-year strategy and discuss long-term housing needs for medical residents training in the country.
The release quoted Dr. Cioe Peña as saying “We’re in this for the long haul. When people hear about these initiatives, they think about a quick ‘get in and get out’ mission. Our partnership in Guyana, like our other partnerships in India and Ecuador, is about connection. That eventually, when a patient steps into a Northwell facility, there is a greater understanding of that individual and what’s important to them and their community. That’s what the core of Raise Health is about.”
Established in 2019, the release said that CGH partners with Northwell department leadership to develop new programmes in its core sites – Ecuador, Guyana, and India – and supports existing programmes in their affiliate sites in the Dominican Republic, Kenya, and Uganda.
It said, too, that providers engage in global health activities to help positively impact the health of communities abroad while equipping Northwell providers with skills that inform practice and support patient-centred care globally and locally.
