Global Wound Care Market Forecast: Opportunities for Barbados and the Caribbean to Tap into Growing Health Economy | Insights from CariWN

“We set up the Caribbean Wounds Network earlier in the year with strong support from Wounds Canada and our company Crucibles is the major sponsor of this over the course of this year,” he said.

“We have support from the University of West Indies, which was important, and we’ve had warm welcomes from the Ministry of Health and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and so on. But this is a Caribbean initiative, not a Barbados initiative, and what we’re trying to do is make a difference through a non-profit public private partnership.

“I am not a clinician, but the stats that you will hear from the clinical people, when somebody loses a limb to diabetes, as an example, their mortality rate is worse than having a cancer diagnosis, it’s stark. The other key stat is that four out of five of the diabetic foot amputations shouldn’t take place,” he said.

Alleyne continued: “When people look at this, they say what’s the cost to the health care system? Our estimate is that in the Caribbean it is US$7 billion. When you take somebody out of productive years, a couple of things happens. One is you might take them out because they are disabled from a chronic disease or through a problem that happens for a number of years. And then there’s often a premature death.”

He reiterated that it was important “to look not only at the medical costs of dealing with these things, but what’s the cost to the economy?”.

Alleyne asked: “What’s the cost to Barbados, to Trinidad, to Jamaica, to Antigua, Guyana, when we take people in their productive years out of the system, because of a wound-related problem and chronic disease problems?

“The thing in terms of prevention is to not have those problems happen, not to have that person leave economic productivity. That’s way higher than just the cost of treating wounds and wound care.

“The flip side of this is the economic opportunity, which is something that we’re also working and looking at.”

Botros’ message to Barbados is that while advanced therapy for wound care “is a growing space and a growing area and you can expand in it, you have to have trained expertise”.

“Part of our partnership is training wound care champions to be able to leverage and utilise appropriately some of these wound-related advanced therapies, to increase the market share in the wound care market, to be able to provide evidence-based care to patients to continue to build healthier communities,” she said.

Alleyne said part of the plan going forward was “looking at how we get access to the right supplies and devices to treat wound care in the Caribbean”.