We admit that Dr Christopher Tufton, the health and wellness minister, grabbed our attention with his announcement Tuesday of two big and bright ideas that suggest some serious thinking on the part of the Government.

The first is the establishment of the $2.5-billion Barry Wint Memorial Scholarship and Development Fund — over five years — for medical students, as part of the health ministry’s training and retention strategy for critical health-care professionals.

Twinned with that, the Administration is exploring the possibility of a flexi-contract arrangement for people who are trained jointly across jurisdictions, involving institutions outside of Jamaica, as reported in his sectoral contribution in the House.

The scholarships will be open to graduate, postgraduate, and current students pursuing studies in nursing, medicine, public health, medical technology, epidemiology, health records management, hospital/health-care management, information systems for health, pharmacy, dentistry, and health economics.

“Unfortunately, we can’t just recruit; we have to now take a vested interest in training and retaining. And so, what the ministry is saying [is] we can’t build hospitals and have nobody to put in them — and that is likely to happen…” Dr Tufton explained.

“We can’t be buying diagnostic equipment, digitising, and have no one to operate them. We can’t not have people who can do the analytics — in other words, take the data and analyse it (health economics) in order to tailor our response to the population. And so this scholarship is intended to solve that problem.”

The flexi-contract arrangement is an interesting concept meant to address the mass migration of health-care workers that Jamaica can do very little to stop. The plan is to do exponentially more training, “including accepting that we are exponentially more training for export, including collaboration with external partners outside of Jamaica”, he said.

Utilising the practice of Jamaicans working part-time in the developed markets and part-time in Jamaica, Dr Tufton argued, sensibly we would say, that it should be possible to establish a flexi-contract “where a nurse could work five months at a UK hospital and seven months in Jamaica”.

“The Government should be prepared to give them a contract for the seven-month period so that they enjoy the best of both worlds. Because I do believe that most Jamaicans would prefer to reside here, but if they can earn a little extra money somewhere else, they will do it on a part-time basis and then come back home — and we’re going to be exploring that,” he said.

The ministry is right to accept the broad view that the health profession is an internationally competitive marketplace, where the US, Canada, and the UK have waived all or most of their restrictive requirements, including English exams, and are more liberally offering permanent residence. This is attractive to many Jamaicans.

Ironically, while they are siphoning off our trained professionals that is not stopping them from issuing travel advisories, like the one in January this year, complaining about shortcomings in our health services. Indeed, “Donkey seh the world nuh level.”

The ministry’s enlightened move is more productive than to sit around complaining about losing our trained professionals or fretting over misplaced travel advisories.