Nevis Health Minister – Hensley Daniel
Charlestown, Nevis
March 07, 2011
Health Minister in the Nevis Island Administration (NIA) Hon. Hensley Daniel lauded the advent of a Cancer Registry in St. Kitts and Nevis. He said the data from the facility would help to break out of stereotypes and would assist the Administration precisely with its resource allocation.
The Minister made the statement recently while he addressed a number of health practitioners on Nevis during a meeting with Chief Medical Officer in the Federation Dr. Patrick Martin to introduce Professor at the McGill University Health Center in Montreal in Canada and Oncologist Specialist Dr. Arthur Porter, the principal of a new cancer treatment facility in Antigua, which was sanction by the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).
“If we know what are the main types of cancer then we could direct our efforts to do that. The Registry will also help us where we [NIA] function as at this level with where we allocate our resources more carefully, in that, if it is that cancer is found in young women between the ages of 20 and 30, it means that we would have to pay some special attention to them.
“So I welcome this because it will help us to make sure that we spend our scarce health dollars in the best way possible and get the best results,” he said and added it would help give a sense of the incidents of the disease.
The Cancer Registry created for St. Kitts and Nevis will be used as a tool to monitor what Chief Medical Officer in the Federation Dr. Patrick Martin said statistics suggested was an increasing trend in cancer. He said the facility will assist health officials to better monitor the disease, with regard to prevention and treatment.
He also introduced Dr. Giovanne Mattenet a Medical Officer at the Joseph N. France Hospital in St. Kitts, who spoke to the collaborative data collection effort between the health education units in St. Kitts and on Nevis.
“Basically we have found that there is information for the public but what we found is that the information has been so fragmented that we cannot get a good feel of what the current situation is.
“So what we are trying to do is to get all the information together, find out about the incidence, prevalence, mortality rate of cancer so that we can get all and form a National Cancer Registry in St. Kitts and in Nevis,” she explained.