(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) Health Ministers at the 21st Meeting of the CARICOM Council on Human and Social Development (COHSOD) on Saturday concluded that in terms of its outcomes, the meeting was a “remarkable success.”

With its focus on health, the two-day COHSOD meeting was held at the Guyana International Conference Centre, Georgetown, under the theme, Promoting Equity in Human Development through Public Health.

Under the chairmanship of Guyana’s Minister of Health, Dr the Hon. Leslie Ramsammy, Health Ministers, Chief Medical Officers and representatives from Regional Health Institutions as well as other key stakeholders in health agreed on a slate of actions and measures to improve regional public health sector.

High on the agenda was a resolve from Member States to continue its fight against one of the Region’s most pressing health problems – Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases. The meeting acknowledged the major in-roads which had been made by the Region in preventing and managing NCDs in the Region and also in placing this health problem on the United Nations agenda.

The establishment of the centre of excellence in public health – The Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) - was viewed as a matter of utmost importance in rationalising and improving the regional public health sector and the Council agreed that measures should be taken to expedite the signing of an Inter-Government Agreement to facilitate the mobilisation of resources to make CARPHA a full reality.

The issue of mental health was viewed as one of the primary contributing risk factors to Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases and the COHSOD resolved that this matter – whether or not it gets international recognition - would definitely be on the health agenda of CARICOM countries.

Minister Ramsammy who led the closing Press Conference of the COHSOD on Saturday was passionate about the inclusion of mental health in the priority concerns of the Region going to the United Nations High Level Meeting on Chronic Disease Prevention in New York in September.

He was of the opinion that mental health was not getting the attention it deserved and avowed that CARICOM would again take the lead launching an offensive against this health problem, thus ensuring that it was not only “talked about,” but would receive the attention it deserved in the Caribbean.

At that press conference, Dr. Ramsammy also told journalists that each Member State had reaffirmed its resolve to eliminate Mother-To-Child Transmission (MTCT) of HIV. According to Dr Ramsammy, “When everyone was talking about reduction of MTCT it was CARICOM who placed on the table the possibility of elimination by 2015.”

He expressed satisfaction that since CARICOM under the Pan-Caribbean Partnership Against HIV and AIDS (PANCAP) had set this ambitious target, “the world has followed suit and it has now become a global initiative.”

He was alluding to the April 8 launch of a Global Task Team, by UNAIDS, on the Elimination of New HIV infections among Children by 2015, and noted that the COHSOD gave “unequivocal support” to the establishment of this Task Team. He was even more proud of the fact of the Caribbean had membership on this Task Team in the person of CARICOM former Assistant Secretary-General, Dr Edward Greene.

More than 700,000 children under 15 are infected worldwide with HIV/AIDS every year, almost all through vertical transmission of the virus from mother to child during pregnancy, delivery or breast feeding.

The Chair of COHSOD told journalists that the COHSOD strongly believed that this Region could be the first outside of developed countries to achieve elimination of Mother-To-Child-Transmission of HIV.

The Council also approved the long awaited Caribbean Pharmaceutical Policy (CPP) that was formulated to ensure the Caribbean’s access to quality medicine at affordable prices and to strengthen regulatory authorities in the Region.

In a similar vein, the COHSOD approved the Model Curriculum endorsed by the Thirtieth Annual General Meeting of the Regional Nursing Body (RNB) in 2010 in Grenada. Minister Ramsammy asserted that this Curriculum would establish minimum standards for the training of nurses in the region and told journalists that the CARICOM Secretariat would formally circulate the Curriculum to Member States.

Also considered as very important advancements by the COHSOD are the completion of the Model Regional Policy on HIV Related Stigma and Discrimination developed by PANCAP and the School Nutrition Policy developed by Barbados, a policy which the COHSOD had agreed would be used along with others in the Region as the model framework for development of a Regional School Nutrition Policy.

Contact: piu@caricom.org