 We are here today for the official opening of the Lammat Mission in St. Lucia, an important day for the Ministry of Health, the Government and the people of St. Lucia. The Lammat Mission is part of the U.S. Southcom's medical operations aimed to build partnerships, provide relief to medical facilities and improve the region's collective ability to meet complex global challenges. Please allow me to welcome Dr Sharon Belma George, our Chief Medical Officer, to deliver the opening remarks. Good morning to all. I would like to adopt the protocol that was already established. On behalf of the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, also the Ministry of External Affairs, the Government and people of St. Lucia, our clinical teams, I warmly welcome you to St. Lucia and also to our healthcare system. This vascular surgical mission is a third mission of the last five years. The coordinated humanitarian mission visit by the United States Naval Ship Comfort, which took place in September of 2019. We also had the minor surgical and dental mission, which occurred in March of 2023. This mission will benefit particularly our patients with kidney failure across the entire island to improve the process of dialysis. We also acknowledge the donation of equipment, supplies and medication to support the mission. I take the opportunity to also highlight that this U.S. medical mission not only provides medical and surgical support to our patients, but also builds capacity in country as our clinical teams will work alongside them to facilitate training and knowledge transfer. So for me, there are three key advantages which I look forward to in this mission. The first one being the medical and surgical care, which will improve the health and the lives of our patients with kidney failure. The fact that this is a national initiative, so patients across the entire island will benefit, although the mission is happening at the OKEU Hospital. We've been working with the St. Jude Hospital in the south as well to ensure that all patients across the island are also on the list to receive surgical care. I always believe in sustainability, so by the Ministry of Health, we are working to improve on the services and also to broaden the scope of the services that we provide. The capacity built in the form of training with the surgeons both at the OKEU Hospital and the St. Jude Hospital will also ensure sustainability of what is learned today. So we look forward to the next two weeks of surgical procedures and we are hoping that we will continue planning our other missions for next year. I'm very excited to ensure that this venture is sustainable between the Lama teams and our medical teams here in St. Lucia. So I welcome you, I really hope that apart from just the hospital, you get the opportunity to visit. This is the most beautiful Caribbean island, I'll let you know. I'm hoping you also get the opportunity to visit the sites around the island. Thank you. At this time, I'll help me welcome to the podium Lieutenant Colonel Devin Watson to present us with an overview of the mission. Good morning. On behalf of the US Air Force, the US Department of Defense, as well as the US Department of State, Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Heights Medical Complex, Dr. Dexter James, Permanent Secretary of Ministry of Health, Ms. Ginny Daniel, Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Belmar George, Chairperson of the Board, Ms. Joanna Reynolds Arthurton, and Director of Clinical Services, Dr. Lisa Charles and all other colleagues and distinguished guests, friends. On behalf of our Air Force team, we thank you for welcoming us to St. Lucia. We appreciate the opportunity to work alongside you in your medical facilities and to build upon the relationships that were developed last year between the medical communities of St. Lucia and the United States. Let me also take the opportunity to wish you a happy Independence Day. The St. Lucia-Lesser Antilles Medical Assistant Team, or LEMAT, consists of 17 active duty and reservist personnel. These personnel include surgeons, anesthetists, nurses, medical technicians, biomedical technicians, logistics personnel, and a public affairs specialist. With us, we brought $78,000 US worth of supplies and pharmaceuticals weighing 1,500 kilos. This is to support the mission and to provide ongoing mutual benefits to both the United States and St. Lucia beyond our time here. We are thrilled and excited to engage and learn from one another while building the relationships so crucial to the future of our partnership. While we are the team on the ground, there is a much, much larger team throughout the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, and Department of State that has been involved with the planning and the coordination of this mission. Through the LEMAT mission, our government continues to be and is dedicated to uniting our nations in health and stability. We are here, we've been here, and we will continue to be here in the future. We thank you so much for welcoming us and we look forward to the upcoming cases of the next two weeks. Thank you, Lieutenant Colonel Watson, for your remarks, and we too appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with you. At this time, we would like to call on the Chief Executive, Officer of the Millennium Heights Medical Complex, Dr. Dexter James, for some brief remarks. Thank you, Madam Chairperson. Who to call established a pleasant good morning to all and welcome to the Millennium Heights Medical Complex. Perhaps a good starting point for us is to kind of understand the context that gave rise to this particular mission. Here in St. Lucia, at least 80% of the deaths that occur here are driven by the NCDs, Diabetes and Hypertension. So inevitably, a number of patients present with chronic renal failure. This requires the installation of AB fistulas. We here at the Millennium Heights Medical Complex currently manage about just 190 patients and a number of those patients have had fistulas in for as long as 10 to 15 years but some of them have failed and we have new patients requiring fistulas. I was just speaking to Lieutenant Colonel Watson and he was saying to me in the United States, the shelf life of a fistula runs between two to three years. We have fistulas here running between 10 to 15 years. So really commendation has to be given to the team of or nephrologists and surgeons here in St. Lucia and I really want to commend them this morning. My intelligence on the market indicates that a fistula installation, the surgical cost for the installation of a fistula is about $3,500 EC and when you are on the actual cost of the consumables etc. that comes pretty close to $5,000 EC. These 50 patients that will receive their fistulas this week over the next two weeks is estimated a cost of about $100,000 US. So when you add $100,000 US plus the 70 that Dr. Watson raised, the government just under $180,000 would have expenditure on this particular mission. But the cost is not the only factor. The knowledge transfer and experience gained by both sides is a reciprocal arrangement by all surgeons and your surgeon is unsurpassed. We support the whole question of bringing immersion training to our doctors here at the hospital and is therefore fitting to bring the immersion training by the Salamat Group right here on campus within our facilities. It really speaks volume to the infrastructure we have here that is second to none and the comfort that you have in using our facilities, using our technology, utilizing our staff to be part of this very noble mission. So first and foremost, I extend my sincere gratitude to the entire team of the Lesser Antelese Medical Assistance Team. These works are not only going to improve the lives, it is not only about philanthropy but it's certainly a tremendous humanitarian effort that will benefit the lives of many patients. We hope one day that the Lamat Group will adopt Sint Lucia as your home base for your entire mission. There could be a lot of cost-effectiveness around it. We do have the capacity. We do have the resident surgical capacity. We soon to open up two additional operating theatres at a secondary care hospital. So we do have the resident capacity here to be able to accommodate each other program. Conceived you have patients from St. Vincent and the rest of the OECS countries all batched and coming to Sint Lucia for two weeks marathon ingesting solution of fistulas, one site, which will help reduce the overall cost of the initiative. So something to think about and I would only say welcome to Sint Lucia, welcome to the Mill Heights Medical Complex, welcome to the OQH hospital. And we wish you all stay a very enjoyable and memorable one and looking forward to the knowledge chancellor and sharing our expertise. Thank you very much. At this moment, help me welcome to the podium our permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, Miss Jenny Daniel. Welcome P.S. I wish you accept the protocol that has been established here today and to welcome each and every one of you to our brief opening ceremony this morning. I will try my best not to make the mistake and repeat the words of my predecessors too much in my brief remarks but I would like to establish a context within which we see this visit and this mission by the Lamar team. We are the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs recognizing the importance of partnership and cooperation in the delivery of quality healthcare to our population. So we recognize that as a Ministry of Health which includes our statutory bodies such as St. Jude Hospital and the Millennium Heights Medical Complex, we cannot do it alone. We appreciate our partners in the Lamar team and I say partners because we have established at least a three-year relationship and I note Lieutenant spoke of continued commitment to St. Lucia in the future. So we now recognize and accept you and welcome you as our partners in healthcare delivery, service delivery in St. Lucia. We also look to of course welcome and support our private sector partners within the island of St. Lucia who also will benefit through the transfer of knowledge from our team and recognizing their role in the delivery of healthcare services in St. Lucia. Of course all of this fits into our health reforms that we are currently undertaking which are basically focused on the establishment of universal healthcare and improving the accessibility of the entire population to quality healthcare services. So what you are doing here today and throughout the course of the next week and a half, two weeks is really to strengthen our population's capacity to access healthcare services. Dr. James would have mentioned and of course our chief medical officer you know the number of patients who require the services very often patients would visit the island of Matic and other places in order to have the facilities placed or replaced. Through your mission here to starting today and the training that we anticipate will take place we look forward at the Ministry of Health to a reduced cost in terms of our medical assistance program as we would be able to increase our capacity to undertake those procedures here in St. Lucia. And of course health financing is very important to us. We have you know scarce resources in St. Lucia and we want to ensure that all the resources that we receive for health for provision of health services are used in a manner that this is efficient and economical in terms of what our resources are to receive. So I want to welcome everyone here today. I look forward to a successful mission. I know that our surgeons are waiting anxiously to undertake the procedures and to receive the necessary training. I do not wish to hold the process back. So I will just briefly say welcome to St. Lucia welcome to our healthcare facilities. We appreciate you we appreciate the service that you will be providing starting today. We look forward to the training and we look forward to the overall continuation of a very healthy and helpful partnership in health. I take this opportunity also to apologize on behalf of the Ministry of Health who would have really loved to have been here today like he was last year. And he knows he offers his sincere apologies and I am certain that he will be very much available for the closing ceremony later. So thank you very much welcome and let us get it started. Thanks. I would like to adopt the protocol already established. As we kick off the third Lamar mission hosted at MHMC I want to thank the entire team both the US and St. Lucia clinical clinical support and administrative staff who have demonstrated the utmost commitment and resolve to making this mission the best yet. As a 17 strong Lamar team joins us in the operating theaters and clinical and the clinics today we can confidently say we have now sealed a special partnership and friendship with the US military based on knowledge exchange skills development and the shared objective to improve care for the clients we serve. Lamar's arrival was preceded by the delivery to our hospital of over 220,000 Eastern Caribbean dollars worth of supplies to support the mission which we have been joyfully unpacking over the past few days. If we couple this with the value of the medical personnel skills on ground this US humanitarian effort easily exceeds 350,000 EC dollars. Thank you on behalf of our patients and their families. Thank you Lamar for sharing your expertise with us and for your commitment to serving those in need. Our rigorous planning phase will ensure that the soon to commence surgeries will glean the best possible outcomes for the right patients. Those most in need of the surgical interventions. Thank you to all our doctors, nurses support staff, Biomed and supply chain staff who demonstrated their fullest commitment in the run up to this mission. And can I just ask for the St. Lucia team just to stand up because I think you all deserve special recognition so my MHMC team please stand so that you can be appropriately applauded. Thank you to each and every member of the team. You all have played an indispensable role in bringing us to today the successful start of the mission. I have no doubt it will be a resounding success felt mostly by the patients who we will help in such a tangible way. On behalf of MHMC we also wish to express thanks to the Ministry of Health Wellness and Elderly Affairs for their support and coordination of the mission. Your commitment to fostering collaboration has been instrumental to the ongoing growth and development of our clinical services here at MHMC. So thank you PS and CMO. Thank you to the US government for your support to the Lesser Antilles Medical Assistance Team a testament to the commitment to ongoing humanitarian assistance efforts and strengthening of a bond of friendship and diplomacy with St. Lucia. The mission will provide not only much needed medical assistance but also solidify the foundation for a partnership that will continue to benefit the nation in the years to come. As we commence this mission let us each take personal pride in our roles and what we are about to achieve together from the surgical procedures performed to enhance the lives of our dialysis patients to the exchange of knowledge and the forging of lasting partnerships. In closing I feel a profound sense of both gratitude and optimism for the future when I see what can be done when like minds driven by a shared passion for improving the lives of people who take roots through cooperation helping us achieve together what we could not do alone. Thank you once again to everyone who has been a part of this journey. Let this mission founded in a shared vision of cooperation and commitment to humanity continue to inspire us. Thank you again.