We Attended The CARPHA Health Research Conference in St Kitts

We love attending health conferences. They’re a great opportunity to discover the latest advances in the field, learn something new and meet interesting people. Since moving to St Kitts about 10 months ago we haven’t had the opportunity to attend any conferences and so when we learnt that the 63^rd Annual CARPHA Health Research Conference was going to be held right here in St Kitts, we jumped at the opportunity and registered immediately and started counting down the days until conference day. In today’s blog we’re going to share some of the highlights of the conference from our point of view, but first, you may be asking: who or what is CARPHA?

CARPHA – Who Are They?

CARPHA stands for the Caribbean Public Health Agency and they are the only regional public health agency in the Caribbean. They provide strategic direction in analysing, defining and responding to the public health priorities set out by CARICOM in order to prevent disease, promote health and respond to threats to the public’s health and emergencies. Their programme of work falls in the following categories

Emergency responses to disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding),
The surveillance and management of non-communicable diseases (NDCs) that have reached epidemic proportions such as obesity, cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
The surveillance and management of communicable diseases (CDs), including HIV / AIDS; re-emerging diseases, like tuberculosis in association with HIV/AIDS; and new communicable diseases that are now endemic in the region
The surveillance and prevention of injuries, violence and job-related illnesses.
Contribution to global health agreements and compliance with international health regulations

CARPHA Conference

Every year CARPHA hosts their health research conference which provides Caribbean researchers, at every level, with the opportunity to showcase their work and disseminate their research findings. This provides the perfect environment to determine how cutting-edge research can contribute to the development of effective evidence-based policies, programmes and practices to tackle the Caribbean’s health challenges.

This year’s conference was the 63^rd conference, making this event the longest running health research conference in the English-speaking Caribbean and it brought together policymakers, researchers, health professionals and public health officials from the Caribbean, Latin America, North America and Europe.

The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Sustainable Health Systems for Economic Growth, Development and Wealth.’ The aim of the conference was to provide an opportunity to raise awareness of Caribbean research that can provide the evidence and information to create stronger health systems in the region.

The conference was a three-day event, packed full of presentations, concurrent sessions, panel discussions, feature lectures, poster presentations and an exhibition, giving attendees an engaging, informative and diverse experience.

Our Conference Highlights

The conference on a whole was excellent, there was something for everyone, but for us certain presentations and pieces of work, really stood out for us. These included:

Assessing the impact of the Barbados Sugar Sweetened Beverage (SSB) Tax on Grocery Store Beverage Sales – with many countries around the globe introducing a sugar tax it was interesting to hear about the experience in the Caribbean. This presentation summarised the findings, so far, from the introduction of a 10% tax on SSBs in Barbados in August 2015. It was promising to hear that following the tax there was an increase in water purchases, a 4.3% reduction in SSB purchases and a 5.2% increase in the purchase of non-sweetened drinks. It was interesting to note that the decline in SSB purchases was in expensive drinks and there was evidence that consumers were switching to cheaper SSBs.

Diabetes Distress and Diabetes Self-Care in Barbados – this presentation was insightful as we had never come across the term diabetes distress, which refers to the emotional impact of diabetes where patients may experience fear, frustration and guilt. It was interesting learning about this and how promoting self-care and self-management may address this issue.

Obesity and Weight Misperception Among Adults in Eastern Caribbean– this was a very well-presented and engaging talk that explored the extent to which people misunderstand their weight. Researchers found that in their study weight misperception was very common with the majority of people under estimating their actual weight. This is a problem because it means that people who are overweight or obese don’t realise it, and if people don’t realise they have a problem with their weight they won’t take steps to address this. This leads to people remaining at risk of a number of health issues when they needn’t be. You can find out more about this study here.

Our Voices: Women’s Perspectives on Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening and Treatment in the English-speaking Windward Islands – this presentation really struck a chord with us as we conducted a similar piece of work exploring black British women’s beliefs about breast cancer and their help seeking behaviour. It was interesting to hear that their findings were very similar to what we found around fear, fatalism and stigma

Finally other highlights for us were, being new to the Caribbean, it was just wonderful meeting people, exploring the important health issues in the Caribbean (e.g. NCDs and mosquito borne diseases) and learning about interesting projects like ECHORN, the new Caribbean Cancer Registry Hub and The Seth Fund, as well as innovative methods of care like that being delivered by the Caribbean Cancer Centre Network – a partnered care hub and spoke model.

In Conclusion…

This was three days well-spent and a great introduction into the research being conducted in the Caribbean. We highly recommend this conference to anyone in the Public Health field and we look forward to next year’s conference. Every year the conference is hosted on a different Caribbean island, and we’re also looking forward to the announcement of which of the beautiful islands will host the conference next year.