By Vernon Daley, Staff ReporterJAMAICA COULD soon start training medical professionals for the export market. Two overseas groups have made proposals to the Ministry of Education to set up off-shore medical schools in the island to train doctors, nurses and medical technicians for export.
Speaking at The Gleaner's Editors' Forum at the newspaper's North Street offices yesterday, Education Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson revealed that she was now studying the proposals.
"We are looking at where they fit in, questions of accreditation, financing and who can attend," Minister Henry-Wilson said in an interview following the Forum. She, however, stayed wide of full disclosure on the offers.
One of the proposals has come from a group of doctors based in New York. According to the
Minister, the group wants to use the Oceana Hotel, downtown Kingston, as the base to deliver its training programmes.
"They have presented a proposal which I'm now reviewing with the Ministry of Health," the Minister said.
Ross University Medical School - an American institution, with a campus in Dominica - has made the other proposal to set up a training facility in the island. The school, which follows an American curriculum, prepares students primarily to work in the United States.
Before now, the school had proposed setting up a campus in Jamaica but this was rejected by the Jamaican Government.
A CLEAR POLICY
Mrs. Henry-Wilson said the Government turned down the offer at the time because it did not have a clear policy as to how to treat such schools. This, she said, was now being fixed.
"We don't have a policy which is what we are trying to establish," she said.
She added that the policy will be dealt with even as the Government continues to talk with the overseas groups.
Meanwhile, the Minister told the Editors' Forum that she was not opposed to the idea of training teachers for the export market but insisted that she needed to see a proposal before she could embrace the idea.
In recent years, a number of teachers have left the island to take up teaching jobs in the United Kingdom and the US. This has prompted suggestions from some quarters of the society that the Government needs to develop a policy to have teachers specifically trained for overseas jobs as a way of earning income for the country.
