EMBA Student Honoured with Meritorious Service Medal
Guyana has one of the Western world’s highest infant mortality rates but thanks to the Chief of Staff at Toronto’s Humber River Regional Hospital, Dr. Narendra Singh, those numbers are in decline.
Dr. Singh moved to Canada from Guyana when he was a teenager but never severed ties to his home country. He wanted to bring lasting change that would improve Guyana’s access to basic prenatal care. Instead of volunteering his services as a pediatrician on a short-term basis, he envisioned a sustainable and comprehensive program to improve the state of infant mortality called Guyana Help the Children.
“The foundation for any sustainable program has to be education,” Dr. Singh said. So in partnership with the local government, he created a residency program at Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) that brought state of the art technology to the country and a hybrid model blending in-person education with volunteer doctors and a virtual classroom where Dr. Singh and other faculty members provide instruction from anywhere in the world.
“Before we started this program, Guyana had only two pediatricians. To date, we have trained over 10 pediatricians and over 50 nurses, which is a lot for a country of only 750,000 people,” Dr. Singh said. “Early individuals that we trained are now becoming the educators, so we are close to it becoming a self-sufficient program.”
To date, the infant mortality rate has dropped over 40 per cent at GPHC in Guyana and has saved the lives of over 150 babies annually. For his contribution to the welfare of Guyanese people, Dr. Singh was awarded one of Canada’s highest honours, the Meritorious Service Decoration (Civil Division), by His Excellency, the Governor General, the Right Honorable David Johnston.
Now completing his Kellogg-Schulich EMBA at Canada’s top ranked executive MBA program, Dr. Singh is looking to gain the financial, administrative and managerial skills necessary to take the same model for a high-impact, non-profit campaign to other at-risk countries around the world.