The Saint Lucia Bureau of Standards will launch a programme for the verification of measuring instruments used in the health sector as part of the SLBS mandate to protect health and safety.
The verification programme targeting that sector is critical to ensuring that doctors and other health professionals are using reliable equipment in doing their jobs.
Blood pressure meters will be the focus of this phase of verification. Blood pressure monitoring is a routine exercise in health protocols and the accuracy and reliability of results are important to diagnosis and treatment.
Saint Lucia is grappling with treating an expanded problem of hypertension and support for improved efficiencies in blood pressure interventions can only strengthen Government Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) Policy.
The one day consultation will see the participation of medical doctors in private clinics and hospitals, public health facilities, private nurses in private care and other health officials.
The objectives of the programme include, promoting confidence in the public about medical measurements, preventing possible erroneous low measurements of blood pressure which may result in patients not receiving valuable drug treatment or high measurements of blood pressure where individuals may be put on a lifelong blood pressure lowering drugs unnecessarily.
A failure in medical measurement is not an issue of customer dissatisfaction it is a concern with protection of life.
In addition with the programme launch, the SLBS will use the opportunity of the audience to address metrication of the health sector. The SLBS is conducting the second phase of work since the country declared the metric as the standard of legal measurement. The consultation will attend to outstanding issues in the use of metric in health and set a timeline for the health sector to make a declaration on being fully metric.
The event will be held on Wednesday, April 16, 2014 at the offices of the Saint Lucia Bureau of Standards in Bisee from 9 am.
For further information please contact Head of Department – Information Services Vernet St. Omer-Fontenelle at 720-8756/453-0049 or email v.fontenelle@slbs.org.
