He said he held talks earlier Wednesday with the Cuban Ambassador to Guyana “to see if we can get Cuban nurses to come into the system now in the immediate period to help to fill that gap because of the immediate shortage that we have.

“The medium and long term is to train and retrain and train more than the capacity than we need,” he said.

He noted that the entire Caribbean is in the grips of a major shortage of nurses and other healthcare workers.

Nationally, the public health sector has a shortage of at least 1,300 nurses.

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