Hypertension is now the leading cause of global deaths in the world and the CEO of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), Dr. Dexter James, is encouraging persons to know their numbers.
James aired his concerns during the launch of the hospital’s Hypertension Evaluation Initiative (HypE), which took place recently.
“There are about 10 million deaths per year due to hypertension and of those deaths, 50 per cent did not know they were hypertensive. The sudden deaths that we have been having in Barbados recently, the Ministry of Health has indicated that they were all linked to NCDs and specifically, these were persons who weren’t aware that they were hypertensive,” he said.
As a result, the Board of Management at the QEH has taken the initiative to launch a programme meant to help monitor the blood pressure of some of their hypertensive and pre-hypertensive employees.
“We want to make sure that our employees remain well and healthy, so that’s the first thing. It is a genuine approach to ensure that we keep our employees well. The other aspect of it is to see to what extent the use of technology could impact this whole question of personal responsibility,” he said.
“We’re really losing the battle with respect to the effect our health promotion programmes are having on impacting behaviour modification.”
He suggested that based on the kinds of sicknesses presented to the hospital, the uncontrollable diabetics and hypertensives, persons who have cardiac problems because they are either not taking their medications or they have poor diets persons were not taking the responsibility of managing their blood pressures seriously.
“So we have to make sure that our caregivers are maintained in a state of health fitness to be able to discharge the responsibilities to the population,” he said.
He expressed that with the use of the device, which is to be distributed to the 350 employees who would have volunteered, they would be able to monitor the impact of technology as being an enabler that would help prompt persons to make sure they are checking their pressures as the device was connected to a call centre in the hospital.
James added that this was not a policing agent as the device being connected to the call centre was strictly meant to monitor the employees pressure and make sure their blood pressure numbers are under control.