Duchess of Edinburgh Visits Primary Eye Care Unit at Gray’s Green Community Centre

Earlier today, Antigua and Barbuda’s Minister of Health, Wellness, Environment and Civil Service Affairs Michael Joseph extended a formal welcome to Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Edinburgh for a guided tour of the recently soft-launched Primary Eye Care Unit housed at the Gray’s Green Community Centre. The high-profile royal visit was curated to highlight the Antiguan and Barbudan government’s ongoing strategic investments to upgrade national eye care infrastructure, with a specific focus on rolling out community-centered services that make routine vision screening, early condition detection, and timely low-cost treatment accessible to residents who previously faced barriers to specialized vision support. During the tour, The Duchess met face-to-face with leadership from the cross-sector coalition of local and global organizations that have partnered to bring the new unit to fruition, including Cure Blindness, VisionSpring, Trinidad Eye Hospital, Orbis International, and RestoringVision. Distinguished guests in attendance alongside the royal visitor included Kathleen Sherwin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Orbis International, His Excellency Dr. Walton Aubrey Webson, and a cohort of senior leadership staff from the Ministry of Health. Four frontline public health nurses, who recently returned to the country after completing an intensive specialized advanced training program focused on primary eye care delivery in India, were also on site to showcase the unit’s functional capabilities. The nurses led live, interactive vision screening demonstrations to illustrate the full scope of routine services the facility will offer once fully operational. As Minister Joseph noted, the new community-based unit is a core pillar of the health ministry’s multi-year roadmap to eliminate gaps in local access to essential vision care, by moving services out of centralized hospital campuses and directly into residential neighborhoods to cut down on travel time and associated costs for underserved populations. While the facility has completed its soft opening phase to test workflows and train on-site staff, it remains closed to the general public for now, as administrative teams work to finalize delivery of remaining specialized medical equipment and formalize all operational protocols. The government has scheduled the unit’s official public launch and full rollout of services for January 2027. Minister Joseph also laid out the administration’s longer-term 5-year strategic goal to build and commission a standalone, full-service dedicated national eye hospital, a landmark investment that will drastically expand the country’s capacity to deliver complex specialized vision care and reduce the need for patients to travel overseas for advanced treatment. Health ministry leadership emphasized that the success of the ongoing national eye care expansion agenda is directly tied to sustained, collaborative partnerships with international non-profit allies and skilled local healthcare workers, as the collective effort works to drastically reduce rates of preventable blindness across Antigua and Barbuda.