The Tribune

By DENISE MAYCOCK

Tribune Freeport Reporter

dmaycock@tribunemedia.net

HEALTH professionals attended the 18th annual Grand Bahama Medical and Dental Association's Scientific Educational Conference at Pelican Bay Resort on Thursday.

Dr Vincent Burton, president of GBMDA, said the aim of the event was to bring doctors together as a united group by building meaningful connections.

"With all the different medical specialists - anesthesiologists, surgeons, internal medicine physicians, and cardiologists - we sometimes refuse to work together and feel that we are on the top of the heap," he said.

"We want to work together as a doctor group with patients, nurses, dentists, and churches; the whole aspect is that we need to unite as a country to have everybody healthy."

Dr Burton said it is important that doctors work as a team and build connections not only in Grand Bahama, but also with colleagues in Nassau, the Caribbean and America so they can provide better exchange of information and a referral basis for all patients.

The anesthesiologist said that non-communicable diseases, particularly hypertension and diabetes, continue to be a serious problem in the country.

The GBMDA invited various medical speakers to give presentations on several health issues, including hypertension and congenital heart disease, among others.

Dr Burton said: "We had two talks on hypertension that focus on how you treat hypertension because there may be a little confusion among doctors how aggressively you treat hypertension to make sure the patient's blood pressure is under control."

Dr Immanuel Turner, a paediatric and adult cardiac surgeon at Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital and the Memorial Group in South Florida, was one of the main presenters at the conference this year.

Dr Burton said that Dr Turner's affiliation with the Memorial Group is very significant because it is the only registered hospital in Florida as a provider with accreditation for a congenital heart disease programme.

"So, it gives us in Freeport the ability to know we have a trusted referral base that we can send our patients to," he said.

During his presentation, Dr Turner said congenital heart disease is the fastest growing medical issue among the population in Florida.

He reported that close to 20,000 new adult congenital patients are added to the total each year.

"According to estimates, there are between 1.5 million and up to three million adult congenital heart disease patients in the US at this time," said Dr Turner.

He noted that the reason for the growth was due to the lack of follow-up by patients after having their initial repair surgery.

Dr Turner said his facility has seen a few paediatric patients from the Bahamas.

"I have seen paediatric congenital heart patients, but we haven't seen any adult congenital heart disease patients from the Bahamas. In the last six months, we have probably done two or three paediatric patients from Bahamas, as opposed to adults," he said.

Dr Turner said congenital heart disease can be treated successfully.

"It is not a death sentence, we have had excellent results according to our surgical data and mortality rate is much lower than the Society of Thoracic Surgeons' Congenital Heart Surgery Database, the governing body that comes up with their own unadjusted mortality score based on the big population of patients," he said.