Linkages established by the Anguilla Community College, with the Council of Community Colleges in Jamaica, and now with the Portmore Community Collegethere, are providing some well-needed training opportunities for Anguillians at home.
A team from both institutions in Jamaica visited Anguilla from September 12-15 to finalise arrangements for the delivery of courses in gerontology/ageing and computer repairs and net-working. The team comprised Gregory Fletcher, Examinations Officer, and Glen Heaven, Registrar, both from the Council of Community Colleges; and Nurse Dione Richards, Head of the Department of Nursing, and Desmond Grant, Head of the Computer and Maths Division, both from the Portmore Community College.
“On the first visit of the Council, the Minister [for Social Development] talked to us about a training programme in Gerontology/Ageing,” Professor Delroy Louden of theAnguillaCommunity Collegetold reporters. “We are happy that we have such a programme in place now, and that we can start the training for personnel from the community nursing home facilities and others. We are also thinking about some technical and vocational courses [once the Education Bill is passed]. Computer repairs is one of our training programmes and down the line, architectural and construction technology, and so on; and so we desperately need the TVET legislation.”
Mr. Fletcher, a visiting official fromJamaica, said the partnership between the Council of Community Colleges there, and theAnguillaCommunity College, started a year ago. “We looked at hospitality and tourism management and business studies. The development has continued and so we are also looking at management information systems,” he reported. “We are happy that throughPortmoreCommunity College, an affiliate of the Council of the Community Colleges of Jamaica, that the basic geriatric care programme, as well as the computer repairs and networking training, [have been arranged]. We are actually quite happy that this partnership has developed.”
Mr. Fletcher continued: “This trip was not simply to launch new prgrammes. We also wanted to look one year laterat what might have happened to the implementation of the hospitality and tourism management and business studies programmes. We took the opportunity to meet the staff and the faculty and we are very happy… at what we saw. We were also able to run a four-hour training session with the faculty.”
Nurse Richards was pleased to announce the launching of the basic nursing training programme on Monday, this week, at the Community College. “The focus is to help Anguillians and other surrounding islanders to acquire basic skills,” she explained. “Though they won’t be called nurses, they are a group of support workers classified by the International Council of Nurses. They will offer nursing care exclusively to the elderly, sick and well clients. They will be directly supervised by the Registered Nursesand will work in geriatric facilities or at the clients’ homes.I toured some of the facilities you have here in Anguilla, and the hospital, and we see great potential for the success of this partnership.”
The evening training programme of four hours per week, will last for eighteen weeks. The course, for workers – at the nursing homes – without formal training, is also intended for housewives and other domestic workers unskilled in geriatric care. The training is being conducted by retired health worker, Nurse Civilla Kentish.
As regards computer maintenance, Mr. Desmond Grant stressed that it was important that, with the widespread use of computers inAnguilla, it was necessary to have trained persons to provide preventative maintenance as well as the actual repairing of the equipment.
“It is basically a forty-five hour course over a fifteen-week periodwith a three-hour session each week. The training, which will commence later, will also involve “assembling computers from scratch,” he added.
