Trinidad and Tobago’world beaters’ in NCDs

He spoke yesterday at the annual Oncology Conference of the Trinidad and Tobago Medical Association at the Trinidad Hilton.

Deyalsingh bemoaned the high rate of NCDs in the country, and reiterated that the nation’s health care system needs to shift its focus from merely treating illnesses to preventing them, which is, he said, a part of the Health Ministry’s strategic plan to fight non-communicable diseases.

Deyalsingh said, “Trinidad and Tobago as you know, wears a crown of thorns when it comes to NCDs. I would like Trinidad and Tobago to be a world leader just like Jamaica in athletics. I would like Trinidad and Tobago to be a world leader in politics.

I would like Trinidad and Tobago to be a world leader in arts and culture and all of those things. But sadly, we’re a world leader when it comes to NCDs. We have conquered the world brilliantly because of our rates of diabetes, hypertension, our high cholesterol, our obesity – whether in children, obesity in adults. We have conquered the world, we are world beaters. We have gone where no man has gone before in our rates of cancers, breast cancer, lung cancer, cervical cancer, prostate cancer and so on. So we are world beaters. But that is a crown, a thorny crown which I do not intend to wear much longer as the Minister of Health. I intend to be the Minister of Health, but what I am now, and what everybody before me has been, has been Minister of Health Care.

“We have gotten accustomed in Trinidad and Tobago to delivering health care, that is, you get sick, we try to fix you. But there have been no overarching policies about trying to get you, before you get sick. And in the case of cancers...specifically lung cancer, we tend to get you at stage three and four, in most of the cases; not at stages one and two where we can give you a better quality of life, and where the intervention is different, and where the intervention is cheaper. But we have grown up with a health care system that is focused on a Minister of Health laying a nice little stone in a building, and I’ve opened this, and I’ve opened that, and we’re going to open more dialysis centres, and we are going to cut off more legs due to diabetes, and we’re going to have more radical mastectomies because we caught you at stage three and four.

That paradigm has to change...” Deylasingh said that the Health Ministry spent a year working on a comprehensive First World NCD platform, which will be funded through a $51 million U.S. loan from the International American Development Bank (IADB).

Most of that loan will go towards, Deyalsingh stated, early screening. “Early detection is key,” he said.

Another part of the Ministry’s strategy, according to Deyalsingh, is ensuring that the nation’s primary health care centres are well equipped to assist in fighting the scourge of cancer. Additionally, he expressed concern about the high rate of NCDs at the South West Regional Health Authority, saying that some “forensic investigation” of sorts, has to be done to understand why the southern part of Trinidad and Tobago has such a high rate of these diseases.

Meanwhile, Sharon Rowley, wife of Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley, in a video message, encouraged women and doctors present to be screened, and emphasised the importance of early screening.

House Speaker, Brigid Annisette George, described the field of oncology as a gift in the fight against cancer.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Nicole Sookhan of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), also championed early screening and pointed out that breast cancer is not easily detected in women with high breast density, usually African- American women.

In those cases, a breast density ultrasound screening is recommended.