Chief executive officer of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), Neil Clark, wants to establish a regional network of Caribbean hospital leaders to share ideas, strengthen management and accelerate health care transformation across the region.
He said one of the biggest surprises after his arrival in Barbados in 2024 to take up the role at QEH was discovering how little collaboration existed among hospital management teams across Caribbean territories, despite many institutions facing similar challenges.
Speaking during the Insight Global Collaborative Group Inc.’s Moving Beyond Regional Change Summit at Sandals Royal Barbados yesterday, he said the region’s geography often acted like a barrier to cooperation.
“When I came to the QEH and we were doing our digital transformation, I was asking which hospitals in the area use our systems and I got some blank faces. Nobody knows. I asked if people knew who the IT (information technology) managers were in neighbouring hospitals. Nobody knew,” Clark revealed.
He contrasted the situation with his previous experience overseas, where hospital executives and technical teams routinely visited neighbouring institutions to compare systems and exchange best practices.
“When I was in the UK (United Kingdom) or the Middle East, I could drive 30 minutes and find another hospital, see what they were using, see how it worked and have a chat with them. I much prefer face-to-face interaction than Zoom,” he said.
Clark said Caribbean countries needed to break through the “blue sea wall mentality” which often prevented regional institutions from communicating effectively.
He said that he had already begun collecting contact information for hospital executives across the region with the intention of formally launching a Caribbean hospital CEOs network later this year.
(CLM)
