 In 2019, Saint Lucia was the first OECS country to launch the Global Hearts Initiative in collaboration with the Pan-American Health Organization PAHO. The goal of the Global Hearts Initiative is to reduce premature deaths from cardiovascular diseases in target countries by supporting governments around the world to scale up efforts on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases such as strokes and heart attacks. Saint Lucia's training of health workers under the Global Hearts Initiative was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic leading to a suspension of training. However, senior medical officer for non-communicable diseases, Dr. Shana Seraphilbert, is happy to report a scale-up of training for staff of wellness centers on the island as of January this year. Every letter in hearts speaks to a particular module which is aimed at improving high blood pressure, control, blood sugar control, and an overall just cardiovascular risk. And today we're here because we started as a country, Saint Lucia signed on to the Hearts Initiative in 2019, in October 2019, and we launched Hearts because we thought it very valuable for our country. Hearts, as the name would suggest, is a program aimed at improving our heart health. If we improve our heart health, guess what? The whole body is healthy because our heart is the major pump and controls lots of things in our body. And the slogan for our hearts in Saint Lucia is happy, happy hearts, healthy nation. And this just means that we're protecting our hearts through making sure our blood pressure is controlled, that our cholesterol levels are controlled, our blood sugar levels are controlled, that we mentally relaxed, okay? All of this comes into the acronym, HEARTS. According to Dr. Seraphilbert, over the past 10 years, cardiovascular diseases such as strokes and heart attacks have been the main killers accounting for about 30% of deaths in Saint Lucia. Recently, representatives of 12 wellness centers underwent training in capacity building, and according to Dr. Seraphilbert, the ministry intends to train more staff as part of efforts to improve the quality of health, thus a reduction in cardiovascular events and hospitalization. One of the things we're also targeting is that patients should not just everybody come at once, but come to the health center at a time when you get your slot of time with the physician and the nutritionist and so on. So this is one of the things we want to see, especially in this year, we want a multidisciplinary team and we want patients not expecting that when they come to the health center, they just come and grab a prescription, because that is not what we want to improve that. We want more than just a prescription, we want counseling, we want patients to actually have a holistic experience. Of the 32 wellness centers on the island, 20 have so far benefited from the Global Hearts Initiative training. From the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, Julia Zepita reporting.