Belize hosts psychiatric nurses

In 1991, the Ministry of Health trained eighteen psychiatric nurses. the programme was the first of its kind and was assisted by a university in Newfoundland, Canada. Today that 3-year programme is being examined by other countries of the region to see how they can apply it to their psychiatric nursing education. Marjorie Parks, the Deputy Director of Health Services, says Belize was chosen as the host country because Belize is the only country where there has been a systematic evaluation of the Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner Model.

Marjorie Parks, Deputy Director of Health Services

“We are the ones who are most advanced in this area. So the other countries are coming to see what we have and to see what

we can network to see how we can improve the services. You know mental health is very important and a lot of us in the Caribbean have not paid a lot of attention to it. So we want to put it now on the front burner to make it the priority in health services.”

“The countries will be looking at the curriculum, we’ll be looking at how to incorporate because this is a new type of nursing, it’s the psychiatric nurse practitioners. As I said we have them in Belize but the other territories don’t. Guyana has mental health officers and in Jamaica they also have that. We would like to standardize it so that we have the same kind of education, the legislation to guide their practice because they would have to be doing non-traditional things. They will be prescribing medication to psychiatric patients and doing other therapy which are not in the law, so we are going to see how that is legislative and other administrative issues.”

The meeting comes to a close this weekend. Technical support for the meeting is being provided by the Pan American Health Organisation.