Today, the Ministry of Health and Wellness issued 60 scholarships in midwifery, practical nursing, and pharmacy programs - 15 of which were funded by the Ministry of Education. It's a push to close the gap in Belize's healthcare sector, where nurses and pharmacists are desperately needed. And while this scholarship program isn't new, it has grown significantly over the years. Minister of Health Kevin Bernard told us more.
Kevin Bernard, Minister of Health
"For me this is always about investing in our people, in making sure that we are able to train and build on the profession we are lacking in Belize. Nursing is a necessity and as you are very well aware, we have been losing some of our nurses to the bigger countries so it is an ongoing process that we have to invest in, try to get as much of our Belizeans to study in this profession and that's what we are trying to achieve so that we could train more of our people so they could get into the public health system so that we could provide better service and we have better coverage because our nurse to patient ratio is not where we really want it to be and we have to ensure that we can fill that gap. We have a plan that over the next couple of years that we can get there so for us it's important that we are able to have this done and every year we're going to hope that we could do much more for our Belizean people."
"Just as nursing, pharmacy is a profession that as soon as these people finish their studies, they're taken to a different area. We fight with the private sector to try and get pharmacists in, not only at the hospital settings but remember we have private enterprises and so forth that use these, because every drug store you have to have a pharmacy and so it's a profession that is also demanding. We have been trying our very best, again we did a very important change last year when we increased the salary scale for pharmacists so we could hold on to our pharmacists as well and we see that working now but we still have a few shortages but we are working on that, we're working closely with the University of Belize and next year there's a plan, I spoke to the Chief Pharmacists, that we are planning to put other scholarships for pharmacists as well to add to the pool of our professionals. And as I mentioned, yesterday Cabinet approved a ten year training package that will see not only nursing but our medical officers, our medical doctors who are going to specialized, we're talking about other healthcare professionals including pharmacists that we want to ensure that we could train them to fill the gaps but also to prepare for our new facilities that we are going to be building."
The scholarships are valued at 1.1 million dollars.
