Medical research and practical medicine must meld seamlessly to the benefit of the public.
This was the consensus during the opening ceremony of the 25th annual Errol Walrond Scientific Symposium, held last Friday in the auditorium of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), Martindale’s Road, St Michael.
Minister of Health and Wellness, Senator Lisa Cummins, delivered the feature address.
She asked the participants what their legacy would be.
“What will be your legacy? In whose shadow will you stand, and who will stand in yours?
This [symposium] is about medical ethics. This is about the future of health care. This is about how policy, ethics, empirical research, implementation, and operationalisation all collide to be able to give an outcome.
“What is the role of the people in this room in developing solutions to solve today’s problems? How do you stand in the shade of Sir Errol Walrond and pave the way – I call it institutional scaffolding – for those who will come behind you to stand in your shade?” she asked.
Cummins said change was happening fast, and medicine was at the forefront of it and asked the audience more questions they needed to answer for themselves.
“Artificial intelligence is already reshaping what we do, robotics is redefining the operating theatre and climate change is creating public health emergencies that many of our textbooks historically never considered and never conceptualised.
So let me be plain – change is happening; change is already here, and more change is still to come.
“So the only question left for you, researchers in the room, is: Where will you lead? When will you lead, and in what areas?
We have to be able to figure out what our niche areas are going to be. We can’t do everything, but let’s also look at what we have,” she said.
The minister said resources such as the George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Centre of the University of the West Indies, the Best-dos Santos Public Health Laboratory and the Barbados Living Laboratory were readily available and pledged her and Government’s support.
“I believe in the people that I work with. I believe in the doctors, administrators and management of this hospital because you cannot blow up the house that you are inside of.
So I am committed to working with all of you and to being able to face the challenges that we need to be able to solve while being able to rebuild and to reform and to transform and to give something new to those who will come after us.
“We have the ingredients. We have them right here. They may not all fit neatly together; we know that, we accept that. But we have the ingredients, and it will be my commitment to you to work together with the University of the West Indies, to work together with the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, to work together with all of our professionals across the way to be able to knit them together deliberately, intentionally, cohesively, and strategically into a single-built ecosystem,” she said.
Dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Dr Damian Cohall, said the symposium was a way to show the public their research and how it could be applied for practical purposes.
Cohall said his faculty remained committed towards enhancing medical education, research developments and advancements in healthcare, not only to Barbados but also to the region.
“To emphasise this commitment, we have certainly been doing a lot of things internally and externally.
Some of these are specifically related to oral programming. Of course, one of our primary areas of focus is medical education, so we continue in that space to develop new programmes that meet the needs of today’s healthcare systems,” he said.
Cohall said they recently launched a suite of programmes and currently feature a post-graduate certificate, post-graduate diploma and postgraduate master of science in digital health and innovation. In addition, he said they had re-emphasised the importance of ethics, adding their ethics conferences were now mandatory and were attracting more than just trainees.
The Dean also said they had recently received funding to refurbish their Williams annex, adding he wanted to develop it into a centre of excellence in translational and prescription medicine.
“The University of the West Indies, historically, has always been considered the academic and clinical leader in this hospital. And in my eyes, that space will be symbolic going forward, because it will now be the symbolic centre for the University of West Indies in the hospital, where we expect cutting-edge knowledge ideation to take place,” he said.
The ceremony also featured remarks from the director of medical services at the QEH, Dr Carlos Chase and UWI deputy principal Professor Winston Moore. There were also presentations of Professor Sir Errol’s book A Question of Ethics by the author himself. (CA)
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