Oil revenues should be directed towards improving population health in Guyana

Dear Editor
In 2016, Guyana made the transition from a lower middle-income economy to an upper middle-income economy according to the World Bank.
With this transition, Guyana has joined a new peer group of upper middle-income countries including Brazil, China, Turkey, and South Africa to benchmark against and compare itself to.

Guyana’s performance on several key global health indicators illustrates the continued challenges the country faces in improving population health as it makes the transition to an upper middle-income economy.

Although Guyana has made significant strides in improving its performance on these measures over the past decade, the country lags behind its new peer group of upper middle-income countries on global health indicators such as Life Expectancy and Under-5 Mortality. Although there are some relative bright spots in recent years, (most notably, the decline in HIV incidence over the past decade) Guyana’s performance on these global health indicators is representative of its previous classification as a lower middle-income country than that of its new peer group.

Furthermore, Guyana faces an urgent challenge in addressing the growing burden of non-communicable diseases in its increasingly ageing population. Over half of Guyanese adults are overweight, and Guyana has a higher than average prevalence of diabetes in its adult population in comparison to its upper middle-income peer group (11.2% vs. 9.9% in 2015). The increasing burden of these non-communicable diseases has placed additional strains on Guyana’s public health infrastructure and has contributed to the dramatic rise in healthcare expenditures per capita (increasing nearly four-fold over the past decade).

At the same time, out of pocket healthcare expenditures have more than doubled, indicating that the growing financial burden of healthcare costs related to these diseases are increasingly shouldered by ordinary Guyanese citizens. With the recent discovery of oil off the coast of Guyana, the Guyanese government has a unique opportunity to direct greater resources towards efforts to improve its performance on these global health indicators and close the gap in health outcomes with its new peer group of upper-middle income countries.

To eliminate health disparities and achieve health equity for all Guyanese citizens, the Guyanese government should allocate funds from the expected oil revenues to strengthen the country’s public health infrastructure, invest in health outreach, promotion, and education, and expand disease prevention efforts.

Regards
Rishi Jaggernauth

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