A family nurse practitioner program for primary health care in the eastern Caribbean.

In 1980, under the sponsorship of 7 Commonwealth Caribbean governments, a program to train family nurse practitioners was initiated on St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Trainees from Antigua/Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts/Nevis, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines were admitted to the program; these trainees were already district nurse/midwives in their home countries. The program's aim was to provide a mixture of classroom and clinical experience that would prepare the trainees for assuming an expanded role in the delivery of primary health care--a role including certain types of work traditionally performed by physicians. In all, the program provided 10 months of training on St. Vincent and the Grenadines followed by a 6-month internship period in the trainee's home country. As of July 1983, a total of 35 students had successfully completed the prescribed program of 10 months training, and all but 2 had been assigned to primary care settings in their home countries. Most of these graduated found that the job of interpreting their new roles to their communities and other health team members proved a challenge. However, the general level of their acceptance tended to improve once the internship phase terminated, so that by now a majority of the new family nurse practitioners have been well integrated into their countries' health systems. Indeed, it seems clear that the family nurse practitioner training program, designed to help with the improvement of primary health care services in the Commonwealth Caribbean, has come to play a key role in that important undertaking.