Minister of Health and Wellness, Senator Dr. The Most Honourable Jerome Walcott, has deemed the small island developing states (SIDS) Ministerial Conference on Non-communicable Diseases and Mental Health, a success.
Speaking during a press briefing Thursday, following the launch of the 2023 Bridgetown Declaration on NCDs and Mental Health, at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre, Minister Walcott said representatives from SIDS countries touched on a number of pressing issues which require accelerated actions.
These include reducing mortality from NCDs; climate and its effect on countries’ ability to manage NCDs; the social and commercial determinants influencing the rise in these diseases, and mental health.
He said it was agreed that mental health would no longer be referred to as separate and distinct from the other NCDs but, instead, would be included.
Additionally, he told those attending the press briefing that Minister in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, Ryan Straughn, participated in one of the sessions on financing to discuss how Ministries of Health and Finance could work together to implement the interventions and changes necessary to curb the current NCD problem.
“At the end, I think we have a very good outcome document, the Bridgetown Declaration, which speaks to the need for accelerated action in a number of areas, recognising that it is a declaration with solutions and plans developed by SIDS countries, recognising that we need to have accelerated action in the countries to address issues of early mortality and matters of childhood obesity, to mention a few, but also recognising the need for SIDS countries to speak with a unified voice as we deal with these issues, not only within our own groupings, but certainly within various international fora.
“[There is also] the need for us to recognise that a lot of the issues are compromised or made worse by the fact that SIDS countries have to deal with the challenges of weather and the misfortunes of these occurences almost every year, in some cases,” stated the Health Minister.
He also emphasised the need for data and surveillance to measure the success of NCDs interventions. Barbados, he pointed out, has the Barbados National Registry which “has been doing a lot of work as it relates to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, and indeed to cancer”.
Minister Walcott said Barbados, like most other countries, already had some baseline information.
“We have an idea of the percentage of obesity in our teenagers, hence the introduction recently of the school-based nutrition policy…. We are now embarking on doing it for the wider community for the fast foods…. In Barbados, a number of people sell from vans, and these are things that we need to look at as it relates to collection of data and surveillance. We are doing that but we plan to do more of that. We’re looking at the whole process of cancer screening in Barbados, as it relates to breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, and cervical cancer. So these are things we’re looking at.
“We recognise that we need to strengthen [our] primary health care…. I’ve spoken recently about the need now to move…to community mental care, and we’ve spoken about utilising the polyclinics more for mental health clinics. We’ve recently made it available that you can have your prescriptions and everything for mental health disorders done in the polyclinics,” he shared.
Minister Walcott also highlighted other local NCD interventions such as the Hearts Programme, which he described as a simple and economic method of dealing with hypertension. He said it was piloted in Barbados and was now being used in a number of SIDS countries.
He further noted the interventions in the area of cardiac care which aim to reduce the number of persons who die from heart attacks. They include pre-hospital care and the use of thrombolytics – drugs which break down or dissolve blood clots.
The SIDS Ministerial Conference on NCDs and Mental Health concluded today, Friday, June 16, with participants creating the operational plan of actions necessary to implement the commitments expressed in the 2023 Bridgetown Declaration on NCDs and Mental Health.