The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Nutrition, in collaboration with the Royal Saint Lucia Police Force, has launched a series of Situational Awareness Workshops aimed at strengthening the security preparedness of health sector staff and medical personnel across Saint Lucia. The first session was held on Wednesday 10th March 2026 at the Gros Islet Human Resource Centre, bringing together nurses and medical personnel in a structured training exercise designed to sharpen their capacity to identify, evaluate, and respond to potential risks and security threats within the workplace.
Speaking to the scope of the initiative, the facilitator of the workshop, Inspector of Police Shervon Mattieu, outlined the specific vulnerabilities the training is designed to address: “The Situational Awareness Workshop entails sensitizing the nurses at the different polyclinics around the island because we will be doing all the regions on what to look for, especially when they are at work suspicious behavior, being aware of their surroundings, signs, behavior patterns of persons coming in and out of the polyclinics, how to attempt to deal with aggressive persons who come into the polyclinics because, you know, right now we live in an age where crime and violence has increased and a lot of persons who get shot or stabbed normally go to those medical facilities for help. And if you have those persons coming in there, they will be aggressive. How you, as a nurse, will be able to deal with it.”
Inspector Mattieu also outlined the structure of the training programme, which combines theoretical instruction with hands-on application: “So the format of the workshop, it will be firstly a PowerPoint presentation and then we will do a small simulation exercise at a later date. We deal with topics like dealing with aggressive persons, signs, types of suspicious activity, being aware of your surroundings, cues as it relates to persons’ behavior, what to look for. So those are some of the topics that we will be covering during this workshop.”
Nurse Sirmina Charles, one of the workshop’s participants described the training as both timely and necessary: “Safety has been a thing that has become of great concern for us because times have changed we have a lot of crime happening, we have persons coming to us for assistance because of those crimes and as with anything, as a female you sometimes feel a bit uneasy attending to somebody who was involved in a crime. So being a part of the training today will help me and my other colleagues have an open mind as to how we move forward with those kinds of individuals and situations.”
The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Nutrition recognizes that a well-informed and security- conscious workforce is essential to the effective delivery of public health services across the island. Further sessions are expected to be rolled out across all health regions of Saint Lucia as part of the ongoing workshop series.