Regional Nursing Body Meets in Guyana

Nurses from across the Caribbean Community are currently gathered at the CARICOM Secretariat for the Forty-Fourth General Meeting of the Regional Nursing Body. The meeting got underway on Tuesday with an opening ceremony and will continue until Friday August 11, 2017.

Speaking at the opening, Director, Human Development at the CARICOM Secretariat, Ms. Myrna Bernard, said the Human Resource Development (HRD) Strategy, which aims to develop human resources for the 21st century, will assist with improving nursing education in various ways. She said the strategy emphasised the innovative and creative people were not created when they left school or when they entered nursing education.

“That strategy is a holistic strategy that is going to look at from the earliest levels… how we develop innovative and creative people for the twenty first century”, she said.

Chairman of the Meeting and Grenada’s Chief Nursing Officer, Ms. Nester Edwards, in remarks at the opening raised a number of challenges being faced by nurses across the Region, including growing populations of hospitalised patients and a mismatch between theory and practice as it relates to clinical education. She said the Regional Nursing Body would continue to advocate in a number of areas such as the integration of class room and clinical teaching , inter-professional education for nursing ans midwifery students, use of technology, continuous education , improved accreditation standards  and capacity-building.

“The RNB does have its own challenges and we will be looking at various ways to address them. It cannot be business as usual. We will seriously relook at our mission, vision and core values to ensure that they are still relevant and current”, she said.

The Regional Nursing Body last met in March of this year when its annual interim meeting was held  at the CARICOM Secretariat, with the performance of the CXC managed Regional Examination for Nurse Registration (RENR) among the items on the agenda.