Health Workers Trained to Better Serve Adolescents Without Bias

Various departments within the Ministry of Health and Wellness gathered in Belize City today for special training on delivering services to adolescents. The workshop, spearheaded by the National Drug Abuse Control Council (NDACC) is aimed at ensuring service is delivered without discrimination. Doctors, health educators, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and other professionals gathered for the sessions, which are being supported by UNICEF Belize. The sessions also take special focus on substance abuse among adolescents, and the need for these persons to access services. We spoke with Director of Public Health & Wellness Dr. Melissa Diaz Musa and Executive Director of the NDACC Esner Vellos about the training and its content.

Dr. Melissa Diaz Musa, Director of Public Health and Wellness: “We realized that there was a gap when it comes to services for adolescents particularly there’s a gap for example in sexual an reproductive health services, mental health services and we realized that adolescents were not actually coming to our facilities or even when we go to schools we did not have the sort of what we needed in terms of the cooperation from adolescents. So we launched an adolescent strategy in health in 2023 and these trainings now form part of that. We’re ensuring that the operational plan to this strategy that we ensure that we start to do our training not only to adolescents and to the general public but we also need to build capacity in our providers so our healthcare workers at every to ensure that adolescents-are welcomed, that adolescents do not feel stigmatized or discriminated upon and are able to access health services. That’s the only way that we’ll improve the health of our population.”

Esner Vellos, Director, NDACC: “Well this workshop is a two day in person training but before we reached to this point we had four virtual sessions and in those four virtual sessions we gave an opportunity to the participants to become aware of the national health strategy so that they can release in terms of what is it that we’re trying to achieve. Two, we taught them about having the knowledge of what is stigma and discrimination, how stigma and discrimination affect the general population and how stigma and discrimination affects accessibility of services and today we’re putting all of this together so that now that the participants have a notion of stigma and discrimination, they know about the national strategic plan in terms of adolescent health now they’re putting all of this together so that they can improve the services they’re offering and also create a much better networking system so that all of us are in the same page speaking the same language so that it anyway shape or form we can achieve the objective of ensuring the younger population access these services more rapidly, more accessibly and also in a way where stigma and discrimination is not part of the services.”

The workshop is held on the heels of the recent Situational Analysis on Substance Use Among Adolescents in Belize, done by UNICEF Belize. Dr. Olusola Oladeji, Health and Nutrition Specialist for UNICEF, said that the results of the study were startling and underscored the need to improve services for adolescents. 

There will be a follow-up session held tomorrow.