JAMAICA AND TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO are benefiting from Barbadian doctors trained in Cuba because they are not accepted in Barbados.
This reality came from Margaret Haywood, secretary of the Cuban Scholarship Committee (Barbados), as she addressed a meeting for Cuban medical graduates, students and their parents – organized by her committee and the Cuban Barbadian Friendship Association –?at PomMarine Hotel, Hastings, Christ Church, on Saturday.
The intense and emotional meeting was held in light of a statement by Dr Carlos Chase, president of the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners (BAMP), who, according to Haywood, failed to provide credible facts about Barbadian medical graduates from the Cuban medical programme.
Haywood said there were currently no Cuban-trained doctors practising in Barbados because they were running away from unequal treatment.
She explained that in 2007 the first seven graduates of the programme were told they would have to complete the final year of the University of the West Indies (UWI) medical programme, after which they would be required to take the Caribbean Association of Medical Councils (CAMC) examination before they did their internship at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH).
Haywood said this was a backward step because once students took the CAMC, an exam to satisfy all of the region’s medical councils, that is incidentally not offered on the island, they were doctors and should not be forced to return to internship stage.
“They were told at various meetings that ‘Barbados is not your end-all; you need to broaden your horizon’. So basically they are telling them, ‘You need to go elsewhere’. And now they have gone elsewhere, there is an article that is condemning them for leaving . . . .
“They had no other alternative but to move on!”
According to Haywood, when the graduates migrated to Jamaica – through application to Jamaica’s Ministry of Health – they were sent to hospitals in that country to complete their one-year internship before sitting the CAMC exam there.
Haywood added that the Cuban medical programme was an “excellent programme which is on par with that” of UWI, so BAMP could not say it was not accepting Cuban-trained doctors on the grounds that they were not fully trained.
Meanwhile, David Denny, president of the Cuban Barbadian Friendship Association, said there was no evidence to prove that the doctors had “made any mistakes, failed any examinations or carried out any bad practices”.
He called on Chase to give full respect to his organization by publicly apologizing for his remarks.
