 Stakeholders representing the public sector and the statutory organizations converged at the Cookopan Hotel to assess and review the island's current health emergency and disaster risk management profile with the aim of streamlining it with a strategic tool for assessing risk star toolkit. Star is a comprehensive toolkit that was developed under the international health regulations monitoring and evaluation framework. The toolkit enables countries to strategically plan and prioritize health emergencies and disaster risk management activities. The workshop was conducted collaboratively by the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, Pa Ho and the World Bank who provided funding through the OECS Regional Health Project. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the world was not adequately prepared to deal with pandemics of this scale and magnitude. This event has had devastating consequences that has affected not only health sector but also the economy, the international trade, social life, politics and many many other areas of the society. Other emergencies and disasters however continue to occur even as we struggle to recover and build back from COVID. It is therefore imperative that we reconsider the way we prepare, prevent, detect, respond to and recover from health emergencies. Dr. Gil Gojada, Senior Medical Officer for Infectious Disease at the Ministry of Health, said having a plan is key in disaster management and was pleased that the workshop provided an opportunity for the Ministry to assess current resources. So Lucia is currently classified as an upper middle income country but we all know we don't have resources, you hear the name but we don't have those resources. So Star will allow us to look at the risk assessment, prioritize what we have so that we can effectively and rationally use the resources we have in order to provide an effective response to whatever disaster emergency comes up. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sharon Belmar-George during her remarks noted that in the past hurricanes, flooding and landslides were the only known disasters in the solution context however she said over the last decade a few reality has emerged. And at medical school we studied a lot of those infectious diseases very likely because those are of different regions not of our region the ones we paid attention to those we were most likely to see. So certain diseases you would know malaria is for there and you would not pay so much attention to them because diseases were well demarcated before but with global travel and trade and diseases and airline away and we're seeing it more and more I mean I did not expect to to manage Chick-Vee and Zika here in St Lucia. And of course we all know 2019 2020 COVID-19 the cherry on the cake. We also observed the potential for disasters as we saw in our sister nation and we must always learn from the experiences of others in our preparedness. When we thought we were having it hard we saw St. Vincent Manager for volcanic eruption with dengue fever and COVID all in one. So it highlights the importance of emergency preparedness due to the unpredictable nature of these events. Dr. Belmar George challenged the workshop participants to translate their newly acquired information and knowledge into action. Acting Paho WHO representative for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean Dr. Parjot Singh addressed the workshop participants via virtual address. During the start workshop participants were involved in compiling and sharing all relevant existing data and information drafting and presenting the country's context sharing results and making recommendations among other things. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Health Wellness and Early Affairs Julia Peter reporting.