THIS week the island’s health emergency and disaster risk management was reviewed and assessed using the “Strategic Tool for Assessing Risks” (STAR) toolkit.
Stakeholders representing the public sector and statutory organizations converged at the Cocoa Palm Hotel for the three-day workshop which was facilitated by the Pan American Health Organization-PAHO, from August 22 to August 24. STAR is a comprehensive toolkit that was developed under the International Health Regulations Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, and enables countries to strategically plan and prioritize health emergency and disaster risk management activities.
The workshop was conducted collaboratively by the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, PAHO and the World Bank who provided funding through the OECS Regional Health Project. Addressing the workshop participants, Dr. Stella Chungong, Director of the WHO’s Health Security Department, Emergency Programme, stated that, “The COVID-19 Pandemic demonstrated that the world was not prepared to deal with a pandemic of this scale and magnitude. This event has had devastating consequences that has affected not only the health sector but the economy, international trade, social life, politics and many other areas of the society…It is therefore imperative that we consider how they prepare, prevent, detect, respond to and recover from health emergencies.”
Senior Medical Officer for Infectious Diseases at the Ministry of Health Dr. Gail Gajadhar, expressed gratitude for the opportunity to assess the Ministry’s health emergency and disaster- risk management resources, while underscoring the importance of proper planning in disaster management.
“St Lucia is currently classified as an upper/middle income country, but we all know that we don’t have those resources. So, STAR will allow us to look at the risk assessment, prioritize what we have so that we can effectively and rationally use the resources we have in order to provide an effective response to whatever disaster emergency comes up,” Dr. Gajadhar said.
“In the past, according to the Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sharon Belmar-George, hurricanes, flooding and landslides were the only known disasters in the St. Lucian context. However, over the last decade a new reality has emerged. At medical school we studied a lot of those infectious diseases very lightly because those are of different regions; the ones we paid attention to were those we were likely to see…diseases were well demarcated before, but with global travel and trade, diseases are an airline away…so it highlights the importance of emergency preparedness due to the unpredictable nature of these events.”
Also addressing the workshop via a virtual address was Acting PAHO/WHO Representative for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, Dr. Prabhjot Singh.
• During the STAR workshop participants engaged in several activities such as:
• Compiling and sharing relevant existing data and information
• Drafting and presenting the country’s context
• Sharing results and making recommendations.