Independent Senator Dr Kenneth Connell has urged Government to allocate a large portion of savings to be realised from a debt for social swap, to be completed in December, towards educating Barbadians on the importance of making wise health choices.
“I hope that the money that will be saved and will be used for health will be used sensibly in a preventive measure to address social determinants of health, and not pivoted towards building infrastructure or expanding a tertiary care institution,” the consultant physician in charge of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s Resistant Hypertension Clinic suggested yesterday, when Minister of Finance Ryan Straughn led off debate on the Special Loans (Amendment) Bill, 2026 in the Senate.
The amendment will raise the borrowing limit from $2.5 billion to $5 billion as Government undertakes a debt for social swap, following on from the earlier debt for nature and debt for climate swaps.
Straughn said while savings from the two previous debt swaps went to preserving the marine environment and the upgrade of the South Coast Sewerage Plant, savings from the debt for social swap was expected to create the fiscal space for the “important matter of management of non-communicable diseases” The money expected to be realised from the buyback in December is estimated at $1.2 billion, some of which Straughn said would be allocated to health matters and Connell told the Senate: “As much as Mr Straughn has said some of this money will be used for infrastructural change at the hospital, I hope that a lot of it will be used in bringing about behavioural change and I hope that these will be community-based programmes, to bring about behavioural change in the man in the street.”
He added: “We are in an NCD crisis. The only way that we are going to get out of this crisis is by putting money behind it because we need to change behaviour and that calls for money.”
He contended the QEH was “in crisis” and identified the rate of heart failure resulting from high blood pressure as a major contributor to that crisis.
“Behavioural change from a public health perspective places responsibility on the administration to change the environment, such that it is so much more difficult to make an unhealthy decision and a lot easier to make a healthy one.
“Behavioural change is not something that happens automatically in public health, so you have to implement measures that will address our changed behaviour towards consumption preference; you may have to implement things like a school nutrition policy,” Connell said. (GC)
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