GEORGETOWN, Guyana: The country’s healthcare system has been boosted to meet international standards, and now the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) is a certified kidney transplant center.
The certificate was handed over Wednesday at the Ministry of Health’s Boardroom.
The Ministry of Health, in conjunction with the Human Organ and Tissue Transplant Agency (HOATTA), supported the hospital in achieving this monumental status, making it the first in the country to get the certification.
Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony said the country’s healthcare must meet international standards, and in recognizing this, the hospital can now compete at this level.
“While we have been doing a lot of good work, we must also ensure that we comply with international standards. What we have done here and that extensive process is verifying that we are meeting all the international benchmarks in other parts of the world,” the Health Minister said.
A kidney transplant is a surgery to place a healthy kidney from a living or deceased donor into a person whose kidneys no longer function. This is a lifesaving procedure.
Enacting the Human Organ and Tissue Transplant Act 2022 made establishing the HOATTA possible. The agency’s members were officially gazetted in February 2023, and their appointments took effect in April of the same year.
To ensure that the procedures are of high standards, there was a lot of investment in capacity building and acquiring regulations to operationalize the Act. There are seven drafted regulations, and staff training to perform the transplant program is ongoing.
Dr Anthony said the agency’s team has worked ardently to overcome barriers and ensure that kidney transplants in Guyana are advanced. Several collaborations with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), among other international stakeholders in the medical fraternity, were key factors in the level of service attained.
With the certification, various transplants are expected to be soon conducted locally.
“Because of these arrangements, we have been able to put a lot of measures in place, so as we go forward, moving from living donors to Cadaveric transplants, I think the public can rest assured that we are adhering to all the best international practices,” Dr. Anthony said.
The Government of Guyana is seeking partnerships with countries like Spain and Brazil to further advance the training of the medical fraternity in kidney transplant and nephrology.
The chair of the Human Organ and Tissue Transplant Agency, Dr. Shanti Singh, said the agency is already working with dialysis centers, which can further encourage persons with kidney disease to consider transplants.
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