When a hurricane or flood makes roads impassable, a community hospital or polyclinic may be the first place an injured person can get help. Saint Lucia’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr Sharon Belmar-George, says free emergency care training for about 165 local health workers could help those facilities treat or stabilise patients sooner and ease pressure on crowded emergency departments.
“Providing quality emergency care at the level of our community hospitals and polyclinics reduces the impact on the health system,” Belmar-George said Tuesday at a press conference introducing the DevelopingEM 2026 conference, which Saint Lucia will host from November 14 to 20.
The training will reach staff in public and private facilities. It comes as the Ministry of Health expands diagnostic services at community hospitals and polyclinics and considers extending their opening hours in phases under Saint Lucia’s National Strategic Plan for Health 2025–2035.
Dr Bernadette Joseph-Labadie, who heads the Accident and Emergency Department at the Owen King EU Hospital, said Saint Lucia has two practising emergency medicine specialists, one at Owen King and the other at St Jude Hospital. Junior doctors can find themselves managing several critical cases at once.
“The emergency department is the door of the hospital,” she said, describing how a gunshot victim, a patient having a heart attack and a child with a severe asthma attack can all arrive at the same time.
Joseph-Labadie said the conference’s trauma training is especially timely given the increase in road collisions and violent injuries that emergency teams are seeing. Dr Tylor Reynolds-Norbert, a paediatrician attached to Owen King’s emergency department, said the training could also help teams recognise and respond to critical illness in children sooner.
“Children are not simply small adults. They have their unique physiological, developmental, and clinical needs,” Reynolds-Norbert said.
DevelopingEM co-director Dr Mark Newcombe said organisers expect 22 delegates from elsewhere in the Caribbean and about 130 international delegates, nearly 85 of whom are expected to lecture. He said registration fees from visiting delegates are helping cover the cost of local participation.
Saint Lucian emergency medicine specialist Dr Lisa Charles, who helped bring the conference to the island and is co-directing this year’s event, will join Joseph-Labadie for a session on the country’s emergency care system. “We’re going to be speaking about our health challenges and how we’re building a resilient health system,” Charles said.
Workshops on November 14 and 15 will cover advanced ultrasound, radiology interpretation and the care of critically ill children. The main conference runs from November 16 to 18 at the Royalton Saint Lucia, with sessions on trauma, critical care and emergency medicine.
Post-conference workshops on November 19 will cover ECG interpretation, emergency nursing and the coordination of care before patients reach hospital. A two-day Advanced Trauma Life Support course will also run on November 19 and 20 at the Owen King EU Hospital.
