The Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, through its Health­Care Com­mit­tee, host­ed an event ti­tled “Trans­form­ing Health­care: Bridg­ing Gaps for a Health­i­er Fu­ture,” aimed at ad­dress­ing the grow­ing im­pact of Non-Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­eases (NCDs).

Chair­man of the Health­Care Com­mit­tee, Bar­ry Tang­well, de­liv­ered the keynote ad­dress, out­lin­ing the Com­mit­tee’s “Triple Win” ap­proach for NCD pre­ven­tion. Ac­cord­ing to the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion, chron­ic con­di­tions such as heart dis­ease, stroke, can­cer, and di­a­betes ac­count for more than 62 per­cent of deaths an­nu­al­ly in Trinidad and To­ba­go, with three-quar­ters oc­cur­ring in per­sons un­der 70 years old.

Fol­low­ing the Chair­man’s re­marks, a pan­el dis­cus­sion fea­tured Bar­ry Tang­well, Dr. Hen­ry Bai­ley of the UWI Health Eco­nom­ics Unit, Dr. Kim­ber­ly Badal of the Caribbean Can­cer Re­search In­sti­tute, and Al­varo So­to of Roche Phar­ma. The ses­sion was mod­er­at­ed by Katyane Boland-Ram­nar­ine, AVP of Massy Dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Pan­elists agreed that mean­ing­ful progress re­quires a co­or­di­nat­ed, mul­ti-sec­toral ap­proach. Tang­well said ef­fec­tive change de­pends on part­ner­ships that unite the pub­lic, pri­vate, and civ­il sec­tors. So­to not­ed that dis­trust in the health­care sys­tem lim­its col­lab­o­ra­tion and urged stake­hold­ers to pur­sue da­ta-dri­ven part­ner­ships to im­prove di­ag­nos­tic ca­pac­i­ty and in­tro­duce flex­i­ble pro­cure­ment mod­els.

Dr. Bai­ley em­pha­sized the im­por­tance of im­ple­ment­ing Health Tech­nol­o­gy As­sess­ment in the pub­lic sec­tor, while Dr. Badal pro­posed an elec­tron­ic med­ical record sys­tem to im­prove pa­tient track­ing.

The Cham­ber’s Health­Care Com­mit­tee iden­ti­fied five pri­or­i­ty ar­eas—Col­lab­o­ra­tion and Pub­lic-Pri­vate Part­ner­ships, NCD Man­age­ment, eHealth, Fi­nan­cial Sus­tain­abil­i­ty, and Ten­der Di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion—and in­vit­ed the Min­istry of Health to en­gage in con­tin­ued con­sul­ta­tions.