The Cave Hill Campus is looking at ways to turn medical knowledge and medical sciences into an industry.
Principal and Pro Vice Chancellor of the Campus, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, spoke of this initiative in response to a question from the media recently about the seeming saturation of doctors in this country.
“The question is what we are going to do now to industrialise medical knowledge? So the capacity we have built, and it is a substantial and sophisticated capacity, we need to industrialise it… You know there was a time when we were producing too many cricketers as well, when we had a surplus and now look at what has happened,” he said.
Sir Hilary maintained that unless steps are taken to plan for the “efficient sustainability” of medical education in this, we could lose that as well.
“If you don’t pay attention to the surplus and plan for its efficient
sustainability, in a short time you can lose it. I always say, let cricket be an example of what can happen to us. You can achieve excellence, you can have great capacity, you can have surplus and you can lose it,” he contended.
The principal added, “So, yes, in some of the professions at the moment we have some bottlenecks, but the way to remove them is not suppress the creation of the capacity, but to find ways to expand and industrialise it, to turn it into a major knowledge industry.”
Sir Hilary also pointed out that countries that have achieved substantial economic growth especially those in South East Asia in the last 20 years are the countries that took the knowledge and capacity they possess and turned them into industries.
“That’s where we are now having this conversation in Barbados, that is where we have to go in the next 20, 30 years,” he added. (JRT)
