Prime Minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit. AFP PHOTO

At Sunday’s Town Hall meeting Skerrit compared the shortage of nurses that existed a few years ago to action now being taken by his Government to deal definitively with the crisis in the nursing profession.

“Every year or every two years, Government before trained about fifteen nurses in Dominica. And though our nurses were going out since the eighties, we never put in place a programme to train more nurses to ensure that we can supply ourselves with an adequate number of nurses for the health system.

“The Government took a first step by asking those who retired to come back into the system. So we have a number of retired nurses on contracts working for the Government.”

The Prime Minister also outlined the assistance being received from the Cuban Government in the training of young people for the nursing profession in Dominica.

“Then the Government launched a massive programme to train over eighty nurses with the help of the Government of Cuba who sent some seventeen nursing professors to Dominica to assist us with that programme.

“There is nowhere in the Caribbean, including Trinidad and Tobago with all its oil, which has an ambitious programme to train nurses. As a matter of fact when I met the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in St. Kitts, he was asking whether we would be prepared to train some nurses to send across to them in Trinidad…. And we will be signing an agreement so he can assist us with the financing for that training so we can send the extra nurses that we are training to Trinidad and Tobago.”

In March 2006, eighty young Dominicans started their training in nursing as a result of a collaborative effort between the Government of Cuba, the Government of Dominica and the Dominica State College.

Recently, President of the Dominica State College, Dr Annette Bardouille, reported that, given the number of nurses now being trained and with further training in the years ahead, the nursing shortage in Dominica could be eliminated by 2009.

The assistance from Cuba in the training of our people to become nurses is as a direct result of an approach by Skerrit to Cuban President, Dr Fidel Castro in 2005.