Minister of Health and Wellness, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bostic. (FP)

A south coast hotel grouping came in for high praise from Minister of Health and Wellness, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bostic, on Tuesday, on completion of a project involving the renovation of a room on the private maternity ward at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Minister Bostic said that projects such as the one executed by Ocean Hotels Barbados added value to Government’s transformational agenda for the healthcare sector, which embraced the QEH as well as all other pubic healthcare institutions.

At the QEH, he shared, projects included the expansion of the Accident and Emergency Department, establishing the Paediatric Department as a centre of excellence in the Caribbean, and the operationalisation of the Cardiac Suite as part of a project aimed at reducing the number of deaths recorded yearly as a consequence of cardiac disease.

The Health and Wellness Minister said that the upgrade of human resources within health care would also be part of the transformational agenda, both in terms of additional staffing numbers as well as training.

Digitisation of records at the QEH and the polyclinics is ongoing, he reported, and there will also be the continued enhancement of the telemedicine capacity to allow healthcare professionals at the QEH and the polyclinics to share information and strategy related to patient care.

But he made it clear that this type of transformation was not something Government could do on its own.

“Government depends to a significant extent on private/public partnerships such as this one, and on philanthropy. Without that, we do not have the resources to do everything that is required.”

Minister Bostic added that Government also depended on private sector healthcare institutions in Barbados and the aim was to harmonise whatever was being done in healthcare, whether private or public, and inclusive of civil society organisations such as the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Cancer Society and the Diabetes Association of Barbados.

He urged corporate Barbados to continue to contribute to the public healthcare institutions as Government strived to provide universal health coverage to every resident of Barbados.

The Ocean Hotels Group comprises Sea Breeze Beach House, Ocean Two Resort and Residence, and South Beach Hotel.

joy.springer@barbados.gov.bb

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