A rebirth of action in supporting medical trainings is evident at the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health, said Dr Greg Dever.
who is assisting health authorities and the College of the Marshall Islands to establish nurse practitioner and public health training programs for existing health staff.
During a visit to Majuro, Dever, who is based in Palau, said he was delighted to see that six public health nurses had graduated from the local college’s certificate program, and seven more are in the pipeline and will graduate soon.
Nurse supervisor “Hillia Langrine said there have been noticeable improvements as a result of this certificate training at the college,” said Dever.
He said discussions are ongoing with college officials to develop the current certificate course in public health nursing into an associate of arts two-year degree program.
The course gives nurses who are focused on clinical studies an opportunity to learn about community-based public health, Dever said.
This public health nursing certificate program is just one of several in progress that drew praise from Dever, who is the human resources director for the Pacific Island Health Officers Association or PIHOA.
“There’s been a renaissance in health training programs in the Marshall Islands,” said Dever.
Among the programs:
• Health Navigators. Hospital chief of medical staff Dr. Kennar Briand has been spearheading a drive to recruit college-level students to get into the medical profession, beginning a critically needed process to solve the current shortage of Marshallese doctors.
Dever said it was using the Marshall Islands-University of the South Pacific Joint Education Project’s foundation science program to develop and track students into medical careers.
In recent years, there were no Marshallese studying medicine.
Today, there are eight Marshallese studying medicine in Taiwan, one at the Fiji National University (formerly Fiji School of Medicine), and eight more are scheduled to leave next year to Fiji and Taiwan for medical studies.
• Emergency medical services. Dr. David Ackley has spearheaded ongoing training and certification programs for Ministry of Health emergency medical staff.
• Outer island health assistants. Earlier this year, the outer islands division at the ministry completed retraining of two groups of health assistants from the outer islands — a training that used to be conducted every two years, but had been in abeyance for a number of years until the recent training sessions.
Dever is working with the College of the Marshall Islands, Fiji National University and the ministry to establish a nurse practitioner training program. The aim is to start in January next year. PIHOA secured a grant from the Department of the Interior for first year funding to develop and implement the new nurse practitioner training program for the Ministry of Health. It will give working nurses an academic career path to improve their skills, qualifications and salaries.
A planning workshop to move the plan forward was held at the ministry during the visit by Dever and Kavekini Neidiri of the Fiji National University.
The program will be run by Fiji National University’s nursing school, and will bring a program coordinator to Majuro from Fiji for an 18-month period, who will work with a local counterpart to oversee the new training course for nurse practitioners.’