Health Ministry explores new frontiers in training
May 9, 2025
KINGSTON, Jamaica. Thursday, May 9, 2025: The Ministry of Health and Wellness is in talks with the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) on boosting human resources for health even as it prioritises public health transformation through infrastructure, people and services. The research-based UHWI has been a hub for healthcare worker training, graduating more than 300 healthcare workers annually at the undergraduate level, along with almost forty specialists at the graduate level through the faculty of Medical Sciences.
Minister of Health and Wellness, Dr. the Hon. Christopher Tufton, MP toured the facility on Monday (May 5) and discussed with its leadership possible models for human resource expansion.
“You may recall or see that we are building up new hospitals, expanding the category of health care workers through new posts and compensation review, addressing some of the emerging illnesses in the society, increasing rates of cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and so on, and the need for specialised care. And all of this brings into sharp focus the need for human resource capacity expansion,” Minister Tufton said.
The need, Dr. Tufton highlighted, for an expanded cadre is “both in the clinical field—nurses, doctors, specialists, but also in the maintenance of infrastructure, diagnostic equipment, and so on.”
In this regard, the Ministry is assessing varying training and continuing education models to bolster the UHWI’s leadership toward expanding the pool and capacity of the local health workforce.
The UHWI currently engages a mix of collaborative training programmes with countries such as Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. This kind of upskilling it says is a win for Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.
“We also train people to train the next generation of nurses, doctors etcetera and it's something that is valuable to us as a society and is valuable to us as a region, because it becomes even more of a challenge with the healthcare shortages that we see worldwide if we are not able to produce our own,” said UHWI Medical Chief of Staff, Dr. Carl Bruce.
In addition to the programmes offered by the UHWI, the Ministry of Health and Wellness is formalising plans to strengthen its human resources through collaboration and health cooperation between countries, for example, the Phillipines and India.