QEH welcomes donation

THE Queen Elizabeth Hospital yesterday became the first public hospital in the Caribbean where patients can have their corneas diagnosed for free. That is because the island’s main healthcare facility was gifted a Pentacam Tomography machine, which will go a long way in identifying a form of preventable blindness called Keratoconus.

With the donation coming from Keratoconus Barbados, through funding from CIBC FirstCaribbean’s Com Trust Foundation, the diagnostic capacity of the hospital’s Ophthalmology Department has been expanded. Keratoconus is a condition where the cornea of the eye becomes cone-shaped, which results in impaired vision and photosensitivity, and can advance to the point of blindness.

With the disease being categorised as rare traditionally, prevalence depends on geographic location and Director of Medical Services at the hospital, Dr. Arthur Harris, spoke about it during the handover of the equipment.

“Locally, we have been able to determine that the age of onset is usually in adolescence and progression of the disease spans from the early teenage years into early to mid-adulthood. This means that Keratoconus impacts on the well-being and productivity of young Barbadians. We also know that although anecdotal evidence suggests that it is common enough to have a significant health impact on Barbadians, there is no data on the incidence or prevalence rate of Keratoconus in Barbados to corroborate this evidence,” he said.

Keratoconus Barbados celebrated their first anniversary on January 3 and President Roseanne Myers said that their main aims included informing the public about the disease and helping to arm the hospital to diagnose and treat the disease. With a price tag of $200,000, the machine is expected to aid in the early detection of the condition, saving the eyesight of many Barbadians.

“We are very fortunate that we have been able to, in the year 2020, have a situation where the Queen Elizabeth Hospital has the Pentacam where we can set about our objective to ensure that Barbadians who cannot afford it, are able to come to the hospital, get a diagnosis and we hope, very shortly, to be able to get the condition treated.”

Myers said before going on to add that the next item on the agenda would be used in treating the condition. “The second piece of equipment that we want to provide is a Corneal Cross-linking machine, which means that a child diagnosed young on the Pentacam can be monitored, but if they need that surgery to halt that progression and the bulging of the eye, they can get it free at the hospital and that is our objective.”

Chief Executive Officer of CIBC FirstCaribbean, Colette Delaney, said that her company and their trust was pleased to be a part of the initiative and said that it was an easy decision for them to foot the bill for the piece of machinery as one of the members on their Board of Trustees was also a Keratoconus patient.

“What we learnt that morning was that there are many other members of our staff who are affected by Keratoconus and that this supposedly rare disease was turning out to be not so rare after all, at least not in Barbados and in the region. So for us then, the decision was a bit of a no-brainer. Not so much because of the impact on our own staff members, but because everybody on the Committee recognises the importance of good eyesight to the quality of one’s life and we relish the opportunity to make a real difference to people, who in many cases are really young and whose lives were just beginning to blossom and would be negatively impacted by having been diagnosed with the disease,” Delaney said before going on to add that they would be supporting the maintenance of the machine for the next three years.

Minister of Health and Wellness, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bostic, was the first person to have his corneas tested on the machine and said that Barbados continues to remain on the cutting-edge of health care in the Caribbean – a fact that Barbadians should be proud of.

“As a public healthcare provider, the QEH is establishing centres of excellence in certain specialist areas of care, one of which is Ophthalmology. I am pleased to state that the Department of Ophthalmology of the QEH is the only eye care facility of its kind within the Caribbean and has garnered a stellar reputation for the delivery of superior care to its patients. Presently, the department provides specialist care in paediatric, glaucoma, neurosurgical and ocuplastics care, which makes it the only eye care facility in the region to offer this range of specialised ophthalmic care and I think that this is something that we in this country should be very proud of,” he said.