Prime Minister of St Kitts and Nevis, the incoming Chairman of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), Dr Denzil Douglas, said Caricom could celebrate 10 years of solid achievements in the region’s health sector development since the Nassau Declaration.
Prime Minister Douglas, who has lead responsibility for Human Resource Development, Health and HIV/AIDS in the quasi-Cabinet of the Caricom conference of heads of government, was addressing regional media representatives at a media clinic held on June 24 on the margins of the 32nd annual meeting of the Caricom conference of heads of government, which will open in St Kitts and Nevis on July 1.
He said the community was meeting at a critical juncture – in the wake of a plethora of concerns regarding implementation deficits in the Caricom Single Market and Economy, the Caribbean Court of Justice, and community leadership – but he hastened to point out that much has been achieved, especially in the health sector.
According to a Caricom Secretariat release, Dr Douglas told journalists that the community was the first in the world to provide an actionable response to the 2001 United Nations’ General Assembly Special Session on HIV and AIDS, and its subsequent declaration which led to the establishment of the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
This response, he said, came in the form of the Nassau Declaration in 2001 – the Health of the Region is the Wealth of the Region – which spawned the establishment of the Pan-Caribbean Partnership against HIV and AIDS (PANCAP), the Caribbean Cooperation in Health initiative (CCH) with its eight strategic health priorities, and the proposed Caribbean Regional Public Health Agency (CARPHA) set to begin operations by year-end.
Noting that all but one major recommendation in the Nassau Declaration were achieved, Dr Douglas pointed to significant strides made by Caricom in the fight against HIV and AIDS. PANCAP, which has been acclaimed an international best practice by the United Nations, had mobilised critical resources to coordinate successfully, the region’s response to HIV and AIDS, and could now boast a scorecard of significant reduction in the mortality rate, increased access to treatment and care by more than 50 per cent of people living with AIDS, and a remarkable decrease in the prevalence rate of HIV infections.
Prime Minister Douglas also singled out the community’s landmark achievements in the fight against chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs), noting that “through the example of the region and the lobbying of our ambassadors at the United Nations, Caricom has led the way for the UN high- level meeting on NCDs in September.” He explained that it was the Caribbean Commission on Health Development, chaired by Professor George Alleyne, which in 2006 raised an awareness of the devastating effects of heart diseases, hypertension, diabetes, cancers and other lifestyle-related diseases on the economies of the region. In response to this, Caricom held the first ever heads of government summit on NCDs in the Americas; and that summit, he stated, produced the Port-of-Spain Declaration – Uniting to Stop Chronic Non- Communicable Diseases – which is now being benchmarked as a model in the global fight against NCDs.
Even more profound, he said, was the implementation of several policies to promote healthy lifestyles through physical activity, and reduce risk factors to NCDs. CARPHA, Prime Minister Douglas stated, would be the final aspect of the Nassau Declaration, and would provide a more effective response to regional health emergencies by consolidating the core functions of the five regional health institutions into one agency. At their upcoming conference, Caricom heads of government will sign the Inter-Governmental Agreement that will establish CARPHA as a legal entity.
“When this happens, we could truly say that, in celebrating 10 years of the Nassau Declaration, we have fulfilled all the actionable recommendations contained in that declaration,” the incoming Caricom chairman concluded.
Against this backdrop of achievements, therefore, Dr Douglas cautioned journalists: “Do not come to St Kitts and Nevis just to criticise what we have not achieved… but also to talk about what we have achieved, especially over the past 10 years…”
