As Barbados advances an ambitious plan to build out a homegrown pharmaceutical industry through landmark legislation, a critical crisis in patient access to basic care at the island’s leading public hospital cannot be ignored, Deputy Prime Minister Santia Bradshaw has told the country’s House of Assembly.
While speaking in support of the Barbados Medical Products Bill — legislation framed as a transformative tool to drive industrial development and create new career pathways for young Barbadians interested in science and pharmaceutical innovation — Bradshaw pushed policymakers to confront what she called the “elephant in the room”: hours-long wait times for prescription pickup at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) pharmacy that have left vulnerable patients frustrated and suffering.
A prominent breast cancer survivor, Bradshaw shared first-hand observations of patients, most notably elderly residents, who sit for hours waiting for their prescriptions to be filled, with barely any movement in the dispensing queue during extended visits. “When I go upstairs to meet with constituents, people have already taken their queue number,” she explained. “By the time I come back downstairs, only one or two numbers have been called. That’s how slow the process is.” She added that ongoing understaffing at the pharmacy has turned a routine trip for basic medication into an exhausting ordeal for many patients who have no other option for accessing their necessary drugs.
Bradshaw emphasized that while developing a regulated local pharmaceutical industry is a “very noble exercise” that will open long-term opportunities for the country, she had a duty to amplify the concerns of her constituents who face daily hardship accessing the care they need right now. Drawing on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, she noted that public health systems successfully adapted dispensing and delivery protocols to get critical medications to patients quickly and efficiently during the public health emergency, including home delivery services that eliminated wait times entirely for many. She questioned why those successful emergency adaptations cannot be revived or expanded to address current gaps, particularly for elderly patients who often arrive before the pharmacy opens only to face multi-hour waits once inside.
Beyond wait times, Bradshaw also raised urgent concerns about access to brand-name medications for cancer patients, highlighting recent constituent reports about the prostate cancer drug Androcur being pulled from the public health system and replaced with the generic alternative cyproterone. While she acknowledged that generic medications are effective for most patients, she shared that constituents have reported troubling side effects from the substitution. She called on health authorities to explore additional options to secure brand-name drugs when clinically necessary, and to ensure all patients are fully informed about alternative medications and their potential side effects before any substitution is made.
Responding to Bradshaw’s remarks during her first cross-chamber appearance under new constitutional arrangements, Minister of Health and Wellness Senator Lisa Cummins confirmed that the government is already moving forward with targeted reforms to improve medication access for QEH patients.
Cummins explained that for years, QEH has operated independently of the broader public pharmacy network, a structural disconnect that has contributed to bottlenecks in prescription filling for discharged patients. Currently, senior health officials from QEH and the national Drug Service are holding active discussions to integrate services across the system. Under the proposed plan, patients discharged from QEH will be able to fill their hospital prescriptions at the polyclinic closest to their home, eliminating the need to wait for extended periods at the hospital’s on-site pharmacy before leaving.
The debate highlights the balance the Barbadian government is seeking to strike between long-term industrial development ambition and the urgent, day-to-day public health needs of the island’s population, with policymakers signaling a commitment to addressing access gaps even as they advance plans to grow the domestic pharmaceutical sector.