Board of Directors 2022-24 - Healthy Caribbean Coalition

Sir Trevor Hassell – President

Sir Trevor Hassell is a medical doctor, former Adjunct Professor of Medicine, the University of the West Indies, and Consultant Physician and Cardiologist, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Barbados. He is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, England.

Board Members

Dr. Kenneth Connell – Vice President (Board member since 2020)

Dr. Connell received his undergraduate and postgraduate training in medicine from the UWI St. Augustine & Cave Hill Campuses and graduated with MBBS and DM Internal Medicine degrees in 2000 and 2006 respectively. He was awarded a Barbados National Development Scholarship in 2007. He was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy degree on completion of studies from King’s College London. He joined the Faculty of Medical Sciences as Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology in 2011 and assumed duties of Deputy Dean- Phase 1 in August 2014, and Deputy Dean of Internationalization and Recruitment in October 2020.

Maisha Hutton – Executive Director – Secretary

Maisha Hutton is the Executive Director of the Healthy Caribbean Coalition (HCC), the only regional alliance of over 100 NCD focused civil society organisations. Maisha holds a BSc in Microbiology, a MSc. in Molecular Biology and a PGDip in International Health. Prior to joining the Healthy Caribbean Coalition, she worked in HIV/AIDS and STI prevention and control for 10 years.

Dr. Christine Chin Chea – Treasurer (Board member since 2018)

A 1988 University of the West Indies MBBS graduate, Dr. Christine Chin completed a 2-year internship in Nassau, Bahamas, and then her residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital, becoming board certified in 1993.

She worked in the Medical Intensive Care Unit at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia from 1993-1995 while also accomplishing a Bachelor of Arts in Economics at Dalhousie University.

Dr. Victor Coombs (Board member since 2012)

Dr. Coombs is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Boston with a Liberal Arts Degree majoring in Chemistry. He obtained his Medical Degree from the University of the West-Indies, Mona, Jamaica in 1978.

He obtained a MSc. Degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine of the University of London and graduated with a mark of Distinction. He obtained the Diploma in Public Health from the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene.

At the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine he returned to train in Occupational Medicine after one year full time practice in Industry and was awarded the Diploma in Industrial Health at the Royal College of Physicians of London. This was followed by the (AFOM) Associate of the Faculty of Occupational Medicine. His training extended to Aviation Medicine in Farnborough Institute of Aviation Medicine, and Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine through Duke University and Divers Alert Network. He also completed a Mini Residency in Occupational Medicine at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.

Management experience was complemented by an (EMBA) Executive Masters in Business Administration from IOB/UWI. Practical experience at the Augustus Long Hospital was complemented by a Master of Science Degree in Emergency Medicine from U.W.I/FOMS St. Augustine.

He has worked full time in Industry for (30) thirty years, for twenty one (21) of these years he was the Chief Medical Officer of Trintoc/Petrotrin. He is a Consultant in Occupational and Environmental Health with interests in Toxicology, Accident Prevention, Emergency Medical Response, HIV/Stress in the Workplace, Health Services Management, Disaster Preparedness and Disability Assessment, Alcohol and Drug Abuse in the Workplace, and Wellness in the Workplace.

He has held positions such as President National Safety Council, Director Employers Consultative Association, Director North West Regional Health Authority, Director Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, Director Pesticide and Toxic Chemicals Control Board, Council of the Medical Board of Trinidad and Tobago, Medical Referee, Aviation Medical Examiner, Diving Medical Examiner and Part-time Lecturer UWI Medical School. He has done Advisory and Consultancy Services in Occupational Health and Safety for Local, Regional and International Organizations. He is a former Chairman of the Partners Forum for Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases. (A PAHO/MOH/NGO’S/Civil Society Organizations Grouping). He is a Director of Healthy Caribbean Coalition. (HCC), and Chairman of Occupational Safety and Health Authority of the (OSHA) Ministry of Labour, and Small Enterprise Development and part time Lecturer in the MPH programme at UWI/FOMS St Augustine.

Dr. Karen Sealey (Board member since 2016)

Former Special Adviser, UN and Partnerships, Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization

Karen Sealey is a physician-planner, public specialist with a wide breadth of experience in public health administration and planning at the national and international levels. Before joining PAHO/WHO, she was the Director of Health Planning in the Ministry of Health, Trinidad and Tobago.

Hon. Laura Tucker-Longsworth O.B.E. (Board member since 2014)

Laura Tucker Longsworth made history on Friday, January 13, 2017 when she was sworn in as only the third appointed female House Speaker in the House of Representatives, Belize.

Laura Tucker-Longsworth is a registered nurse who received her basic nursing and midwifery education from the Bliss School of Nursing in Belize City, which is now known as the Faculty of Nursing and Allied Health, University of Belize.

She holds a Certificate in Nursing Education from the University of the West Indies School of Nursing. She earned a Master’s of Science degree in nursing from the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, Loyola University Chicago, where she majored in Health Systems Management with a focus on outcomes performance. Mrs. Longsworth was a Sister Tutor and Acting Principal at the Bliss School of Nursing. She played a key role in upgrading the Registered Nurse curriculum from a diploma program to a baccalaureate degree and participated in the transitioning of the School of Nursing into the University of Belize.

Nurse Longsworth is an entrepreneur and is the managing director of Nursing & Healthcare Services (NHS) Consultants Ltd. The company offers consulting services that are tailored towards assisting healthcare providers and other agencies to deliver quality healthcare services to the Belizean community. Consulting services focus on improving the quality of life for individuals through the promotion of wellness initiatives, early interventions, rehabilitative services and lifestyle changes that can be adopted to achieve optimal levels of health. This is facilitated by the promotion and implementation of continuous quality improvement initiatives in health systems.

Laura Tucker-Longsworth has been a lifelong member of the Nurses Association of Belize and continues to counsel, mentor and support her nursing colleagues and nursing students. She is the Chairperson of the Disciplinary Committee for the Nurses and Midwives Council of Belize. The Council has the responsibility to ensure that nurses code of ethics is upheld, determine if standards of practice have been compromised and also protect the rights of nurses and patients. She collaborated with colleagues to develop an evidenced-based paper entitled Harmonizing Nursing Education: Theory and Practice which was published in the Caribbean Quarterly (2013).

In August 2014, Prime Minister Dean Barrow appointed her to the position of Chairperson of the National Aids Commission. Since her appointment, the organization successfully submitted a proposal for three million US. dollars to the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS/TB prevention and control. Additionally, committees have been reconstituted to ensure that the needs of key affected population (persons living with HIV/AIDS/TB, transgender persons, and LGBT community) and the wider community are addressed. She represents Belize on the Board for PANCAP (Caribbean Partnership Against HIV/AIDS) which is a regional CARICOM organization. In June 2016, she represented the National AIDS Commission at the United Nations High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS.

In January 2015, she was honored with the OBE Award for contribution to Nursing and Community Service. In March 2013, she received an Outstanding Woman Award from the University of the West Indies Open Campus in Belize for her commitment to the development of women and community in the area of health care and cancer awareness. Similarly, in 2003 she was the recipient of an award for Professionalism and Service from Loyola University Chicago.

Laura is a founding member and President of the Belize Cancer Society (BCS) and was appointed by the Minister of Health as a commissioner on the Non-Communicable Disease Commission (NCD). In collaboration with the Ministry of Health, the BCS was awarded US. $150,000 (in 2015), by the Social Security Board (SSB), to facilitate cancer treatment for pediatric patients in Mexico. Collaborative efforts also resulted in financing from SSB to procure HPV vaccines which is now being offered to ten year old girls, free of cost, as a longterm public health strategy to prevent cervical cancer.

She serves on the Board of Directors for the Healthy Caribbean Coalition (HCC)-a regional organization that works to increase the level of attention to non-communicable diseases. She represented the HCC at the World Cancer Congress (Dec. 2014) in Melbourne Australia, and also at an NCD conference in Sharjah (UAE) in 2015. She was featured in a documentary on cancer initiatives in Belize which was launched at an World Health Organization conference in Geneva (Dec. 2015), which she attended. As president of the Belize Cancer Society she advocates tirelessly for an “all of society” approach to address the prevention and control of cancer and for the establishment of a rights-based- comprehensive cancer control program in Belize.

In December 2016, she was nominated for the position of Speaker of the House for the National Assembly of Belize. Confirmation and formal appointment will take place in 2017 and Mrs. Longsworth will join the ranks of only two other women who have held that position and the first Nurse to ascend to the prestigious status of Speaker of the House in Belize.

Laura has been married for 46 years and is the mother of three children, seven grandchildren and one great granddaughter.

Mr. Ronnie Bissessar (Board member since 2020)

Mr. Bissessar is the President of the Trinidad and Tobago Heart Foundation (TTHF) which is a not for profit Foundation creating public awareness of heart health, healthy lifestyles and proper dietary habits in an effort to reduce the incidence of heart disease and stroke.

Mr. Bissessar is also the Deputy Chair of the Trinidad and Tobago Non-Communicable Diseases Alliance (TTNCD) established in 2016; Mr. Bissessar’s vision for the TTNCD is that its nine (9) individual members will promote the prevention and control of NCD’s by harnessing the individual resources of the member and, through joint patient advocacy, achieve national access to health services for the early detection, treatment and rehabilitation of persons suffering with NCD’s.

Mr. Bissessar is a director of the InterAmerican Heart Foundation (IAHF) (headquartered in Dallas, Texas) and the Healthy Caribbean Coalition (HCC) based in Barbados.

Mr. Bissessar is an Attorney at Law in private practice and is Head of Chambers at Lawgivers; he is also a Mediator and a former Vice President of the Assembly of Southern Lawyers and Past President of the Rotary Club of San Fernando South. Mr. Bissessar has served in numerous leadership capacities with non-governmental organisations, charities and philanthropic groups.

Mr. Bissessar is a Senior Ordinary Member of the Council of the Law Association and is a former Chairman (and now Director) of the Caribbean Corporate Governance Institute which is a not for profit Foundation whose principal objective is to encourage corporate governance best practices regionally; Mr. Bissessar is co-founder of the Trinidad and Tobago Legal Network which promotes and provides continuing legal education to members of the legal profession.

Mr. Bissessar is a former Chairman of the South-West Regional Health Authority (SWRHA) (1997-2001) and a former Director of TSTT.

Mr. Bissessar was a Lecturer in Corporate Practice and Procedure at the Hugh Wooding Law School (2008-2020) and is an External Examiner of the University of the West Indies (UWI).

In 1985 Mr. Bissessar was awarded the Bachelor of Science Degree in Economics from the University of the West Indies and in 1988 was awarded an LLB from the University of London. In 1993 he received the Legal Education Certificate from the Hugh Wooding Law School; Mr. Bissessar is a Certified Mediator with the Mediation Board of Trinidad and Tobago.

Mr. Bissessar is married to Dr. Sabita Harrikissoon (who is a Dental Surgeon) and they have two (2) children Sveva (13) and Seth (6).

Dr. Colette Cunningham-Myrie (Board member since 2020)

Dr. Colette Cunningham-Myrie is a physician, who is an accomplished applied public health: specialist/ epidemiologist and senior lecturer in the Department of Community Health and Psychiatry at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus, Jamaica. She is also a member of the Diabetes Association of Jamaica (DAJ) that joined our clinical care team immediately post medical internship in 1993 and since then has given unbroken voluntary clinical care to persons with this NCD at our Association’s head office branch. Beyond clinical care, Dr. Cunningham-Myrie has been a strong advocate for the DAJ through health education and promotion activities across Jamaica.

During the decade of the 1990’s, she was a key faculty member of the multidisciplinary team for outreach clinics, including our Lay Diabetes Educators program, which was developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Health Jamaica, to train lay community leaders on key aspects of diabetes symptoms, signs and management, nutrition and foot care. This program was later recognized internationally as an important tool in community outreach. She also served as editor the association’s DIALOG newsletter. Between 1996 and 1998 she served as the Medical Association of Jamaica’s representative on the Board of Directors.

In 1998 she was awarded a Regional Study Grant from the Small Embassy Project Program of the Royal Netherlands Embassy based on her work with the DAJ. This grant allowed her to complete the Master of Public Health degree in 1999 at the UWI, which catapulted her stellar contribution to Jamaica and the Caribbean as a public health specialist. In the early 2000’s she served as National Epidemiologist in the Ministry of Health, Jamaica providing leadership of both the Chronic Diseases & Injuries and Communicable Diseases/Disease Surveillance portfolios which included crafting Jamaica’s first national Strategic Plan for the NCDs in 2002. Since 2003 she joined the UWI Mona campus and lectures on Epidemiology, Public Health, Family Medicine and Research Methods to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. A Fulbright scholar, she was Jamaica’s Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow for 2010/2011 and spent the year at Tulane University in the New Orleans, USA honing skills in social epidemiology and international health. In 2018 she was awarded the Dr PH degree (with high commendation), her thesis assessing geographic variations in obesity related disorders and their risk factors in Jamaica.

Dr. Cunningham-Myrie has significantly increased the NCDs research footprint of the UWI by conducting pioneering research on the NCDs and their risk factors, social determinants of health, patient satisfaction and health impact assessment. She has also provided technical expertise through consultancies to policymakers in the Caribbean region, including the CARICOM Commission on Health and Development (CCHD) Sub-Committee on Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases, which provided evidence for the landmark 2007 Port of Spain Declaration on NCDs.

Dr. Dawn Josephine Gayapersad (Board member since 2022)

Dr. Dawn Josephine Gayapersad is a member of Cancer Support Services, Barbados. A retiree and volunteer with a passionate voice for people living with NCDs. A dedicated researcher seeking out evidence based data to increase awareness through numbers. In the USA, she worked in the startup biotechnology industry on discovery and new technologies winning awards for her work. As a volunteer she won awards for her work with underprivileged youth through the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, and for outstanding service with the American Red Cross.

Dr. Dawn grew up in Trinidad. She attended Biche Presbyterian School in rural Trinidad, she won a scholarship and was accepted at St Augustine Girls High School, graduating with one prize, several distinctions and honors.

Dawn earned a B.Sc. in England, an international MBA in Belgium, and Ph.D. in the USA. At Hazleton Biotechnologies, one of America’s first biotechnology startups, she worked on erythropoietin, this discovery opened the door for cancer therapeutics, and the first low dose birth control pill. Using her unique combination of cellular biology, statistics and economics knowledge, she improved data analytics and reporting for clinical safety human trials. She then worked at the startup Oncor as a regulatory professional seeking government approvals for Her2Neu breast cancer and Fragile X markers, and the first radioactive HPV test. Because of Digene’s vision for HPV, she took a risky job with this startup that brought the HPV non radioactive mRNA test to market and the global study linking HPV with cervical cancer, she won two awards for above and beyond regulatory achievements.

In 2002, she started her own business and experienced her first cancer event. In business, her experience earned contracts from several big corporations including Ethicon, the device and diagnostics division of Johnson and Johnson where she won an award for collaboration.

In 2010, she started volunteering for and mentoring disadvantaged youth through the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), Maryland, USA. She was appointed to the Advisory Board. She received an award for exemplary service by developing innovative ways to open doors for NFTE and its students.

During hurricane Katrina, Dawn served over 100 hours at the American Red Cross, Washington, D.C. searching for missing persons. She received an award for outstanding service.

In 2014, she experienced a second cancer event and joined a cancer support group. This opened her view of cancer patients and their lived experiences.

In August 2019, she arrived to live in Barbados and sought out a support group, she chose to become a member and volunteer of Cancer Support Services. In 2021 she completed a research report on PSA Screening over 5 years for CSS She can often be found on Brownes Beach reading papers on human genetics, cellular biology, and novels by bajan authors. She has three daughters.

She hopes to help others succeed and thrive.

“Anyone who leaves their homeland, by force or by will, can determine to embrace the entrepreneurial mindset and succeed. And they will know that in this journey, they can help others succeed.” Dawn Gayapersad February 2018

Dr. Tamara Remy (Board member since 2022)

Dr Tamara Remy is a General Surgeon based in St. Lucia and one of the Directors at the Healthy Caribbean Coalition (HCC), the only Caribbean NCD alliance of over 100 health and non-health civil society organisations (CSOs).

Since 2012 Dr Remy has been a General surgeon at Tapion Hospital, a private hospital located on the picturesque Tapion Reef overlooking the sea at Castries, St Lucia. In 2014 she was President of the St. Lucia Medical & Dental Association and is currently the President of the Saint Lucia Cancer Society.

She is a Member of the American Society of Breast Surgeons. Dr Remy is always eager to share her wealth of knowledge in Breast Cancer Prevention and Care.

Previous Boards:

- 2020-22
- 2019-20
- 2018-19
- 2016-18
- 2014-16
  - Prof. Sir Trevor Hassell
  - Dr. Victor Coombs
  - Dr. Mortimer Moxey
  - Ms. Laura Tucker-Longsworth
  - Prof. Rainford Wilks
  - Mrs. Maisha Hutton
- 2012-14
  - Prof. Sir Trevor Hassell
  - Dr. Victor Coombs
  - Mrs. Debbie Chen
  - Ms. Joanne DeFreitas
  - Dr. Virginia Asin Oostburg