Government will significantly expand the availability of facilities for Barbadians who have kidney disease and need regular diaslysis treatment.
Minister of Health and Wellness Senator Lisa Cummins said while the ministry was “focusing first and foremost on prevention and on screening as perhaps the most important tool that any health system can make”, it was also committed to giving “persons additional access to dialysis support”.
She was speaking in the Senate Wednesday while leading debate on the Human Tissue Transplant Bill, 2026.
Cummins said that “at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital now, we have . . . [about] 340 [patients] on dialysis, and they’re there in a 24-chair facility . . . at the QEH”.
“And then we also have smaller facilities in partnership with a private sector provider at three different locations, one location in Belleville, one in the . . . polyclinic in St John servicing that part of the country, and then we have another facility in the Maria Holder Trust building in Warrens, where you go, obviously, because of the connection . . . between uncontrolled diabetes, and kidney disease,” she said.
“But we’re now looking to do more. There are people who are having two treatments of dialysis when they should be having three, simply because the wait time and the capacity is growing faster than the facilities are providing the support. We need to be able to meet people’s needs where they are.”
Cummins explained that while the ministry would continue to focus on providing services, including dialysis, so that people could stay where they lived to access care, “one of the things that we have agreed as a ministry is to expand the capacity for care and to ensure that no person who needs dialysis is without access to care”.
“So, in different locations across the country, we will continue to support that, but it is our intention to expand significantly the capacity in a central location to give persons additional access to dialysis support,” she said. “If it is two treatments . . . a week and you need three, then we want people to be able to have three, because from what I’ve seen and heard from the doctors and the professionals, that improves outcomes. So we want to be able to give that additional support.”
Cummins underscored the importance of detection and prevention of serious illnesses.
She said the Ministry of Health was developing a life course screening framework “to normalise screening, because it’s important for us to get detection and prevention so we can get in front of these illnesses”. (SC)
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