Barbados and other Caribbean islands face a critical shortage of healthcare workers, risking the collapse of affordable and accessible medical services, a global health expert warned on Wednesday.
The brain drain of nurses to the United States and reluctance to adopt new technologies are exacerbating the crisis, she said.
Addressing the declining healthcare workforce in the region will be crucial to ensuring that citizens can continue to have access to affordable, effective and easily accessible healthcare services, said Dr Anna van Poucke, Global Head of Healthcare, for the multinational accounting and professional services firm, KPMG International, and Healthcare Senior Partner for KPMG in the Netherlands.
Dr Poucke made the comments at a KPMG event for healthcare professionals and industry partners on its Global Centre of Excellence (COE) for island healthcare, which was launched in Bermuda in 2024, and the firm’s other health initiatives.
The COE is an initiative which seeks to assist healthcare professionals in sharing their knowledge and experiences among the islands, to help deliver accessible, affordable and high-quality care to Caribbean citizens.
Dr van Poucke said though several issues affect the delivery of healthcare in Barbados and the region as a whole, the declining workforce remains a major challenge for practitioners, and it was a situation that required all stakeholders to address as a matter of urgency.
“I think the main challenge in healthcare at this moment is the workforce issue. So not having enough workforce any more creates a lot of waiting lists with backlogs, staff getting overburdened, [and] not providing services in certain areas any more,” she said.
“You [in Barbados] are educating a lot of nurses, I know you are bringing in nurses from Ghana, but what’s happening then is that the US starts hiring your nurses. So we are moving nurses around, that is not solving the problem. So we need to start [asking] what the nurses really need to do, can we have other workers in, can digital take over a lot of the tasks? That is what we need to rethink.”
The healthcare specialist also noted that the reluctance seen among the healthcare fraternity to implement new technologies which seek to streamline work processes has also been a persistent challenge for some time.
“A lot of sectors are already transforming using technology. Look at media, look at consumer and retail, look at industry and manufacturing,” said Dr van Poucke. “Healthcare is lagging behind. There is quite a lot of risk aversion, because it always used to be a people-to-people business, and now it’s going to change much more in having technology in the middle. It takes a long time for healthcare professionals to get used to that and start to trust the technology, but I can see with the younger generations that is [changing] now.”
She acknowledged that while COVID-19 placed a significant strain on healthcare systems at its peak, the pandemic also prompted medical professionals to develop innovative solutions to address challenges. However, she expressed concern that many of the valuable lessons learned during the pandemic have yet to be widely implemented.
Dr van Poucke explained: “I think what we learned in COVID is that if we work together in healthcare, and if we share capacity, and if we think about new ways of organising our healthcare staff, we could provide so much more care. If you really are much more flexible and start thinking differently about the workforce, you can really increase the capacity.”
She further added that remote working and telemedicine which allows doctors to speak to patients remotely was a major positive development during the pandemic, which has seen a noticeable decline with many healthcare institutions in the region and the world over not utilising the full scope of what these technologies have to offer.
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