June 2018c

90 91 from Europe and elsewhere, before they have achieved FDA Approval. Once they are certified, we’re able to adopt those technologies on a commercial basis and make them available to people from North, South, and Central America, in some instances, years before possible FDA Approval. “Stem cell therapy and research is another such area in which the Bahamas has set up their own legislation to keep the jurisdiction and ethical practices clean and pristine. To that end, we’ve developed an Ambulatory Surgical Hospital and Interventional Centre for minimal- ly invasive, same-day surgery and non-surgical interventional techniques. That’s our latest, most expensive initiative, but we’re really ex- pecting great things from it, because it opens up the scope for so many people, companies, industries and concepts.” BVC: What are the biggest healthcare chal- lenges in the Bahamas? Dr. Brown: “The biggest challenge is money. We, at The Medical Pavilion Bahamas, concen- trate on life-saving technologies dealing with heart, cancer, kidney failure, and critical care. Having said that, what probably kills more people is not having ready access to these req- THE MEDICAL PAVILION BAHAMAS PREFERRED VENDOR n Physician’s Alliance Ltd uisite services. When we started our Partnered Care Model, it was strictly about reducing costs, voluntarily on our part, so we take the loss while affording less fortunate individuals increased access. It’s really unfortunate that patients sometimes don’t do as well as they could have, simply because they didn’t have the funding. That’s on the service receipt side. “Our side is the provision of service, wherein access to capital is a major challenge, and we end up having high debt servicing to provide these services. We developed a cancer centre as a US $15 million investment – as you can well imagine, to do same with consumer banking financing is ludicrous. But we did it anyhow, because we thought the service was that im- portant. Unfortunately, it means a much longer time before you see a return on one’s invest- ment. In a developing country, we could just say we’re not going to do it. Or we can bite the bullet and set the foundation, so that the coun- try actually does develop. Hopefully, we’ll see some more of that in my lifetime.” BVC: What is your vision for TMPB over the next five years? Dr. Brown: “I’d like to leave The Medical Pa- vilion Bahamas in a pristine location, where it has electronic medical records, and a paperless environment. We also want to be up to date on our IT and social media presence. Investments will be in the form of enhancing what we do now, while keeping our finger on the pulse for what the country needs, and helping to make it happen. “To that extent, we’re looking at new part- nerships with seasoned, mature, international entities. Now that we’ve been able to show that developing countries can do good things on our own, we have a lot of professionals contacting us about bringing their advanced services to the Bahamas. We have helped to el- evate the healthcare system here in our Baha- mas, and to an extent, in the Greater Caribbean. Hopefully, others will continue to do likewise and the level of healthcare available to all our people should improve.”