Health Minister Addresses Regional Health and Education Ministers’ Meetings

Minister of Health, Hon. Rudyard Spencer, will be at the Ritz Carlton in Montego Bay, St. James this week and will be addressing the Eighteenth Meeting of the CARICOM Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD), which is scheduled to take place from Wednesday June 3, 2009, to Thursday, June 4, 2009. COHSOD is being held under the theme “Winds of Change: Education and Health Collaborating to Advance Human and Social Development.”
Ministers of Health and Education from the region will be discussing matters including the impact of the current global financial crisis on the health and education sectors and will primarily focus on strategies for implementing joint programmes that place a human face on the flagship priorities of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).
Minister Spencer will then join his Latin American counterparts from June 5-6, 2009, for a meeting of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The Ministers will, in the two days, be discussing priorities for dealing with the challenges of HIV, universal access to HIV prevention, care and treatment, the economic implications of HIV and the strategies for resource mobilisation.
This meeting, which is co-sponsored by the United Nations Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC, and the World Health Organisation/Pan American Health Organisation, is a follow up to a Regional Forum held in Mexico in July 2008. The forum spoke to the role of education and health in HIV and will set a common LAC framework to be advocated at the ECOSOC Annual Ministerial Review in September 2009 at the United Nations (UN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
About 70 delegates are expected to attend COHSOD, while 100 should be in attendance at the ECOSOC meeting. Some of the participants include Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Sheila Campbell Forrester, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, Dr. Grace Allen Young, Minister of Education, Hon. Andrew Holness, President of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, H. E. Sylvie Lucas, Caricom Secretary General Special Envoy on HIV for the Caribbean and Director Emeritus of PAHO, Sir George Alleyne and Prime Minister of St. Kitts and Nevis, Dr. Denzil Douglas.