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Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 22\u00a0May\u00a0 2023.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>The Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to work together in preventing disease, promoting, and protecting public health. This agreement builds on a long-term collaboration to improve regional health security across the Caribbean, enhancing disease surveillance and better protecting people from health threats.\u00a0\u00a0 More than one third of the visitors to the Caribbean are from the United Kingdom. The UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs) of Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, and Montserrat are also CARPHA Member States.<\/p>\n \n Dr. Joy St. John, Executive Director of CARPHA, said \u201cI welcome this agreement with UKHSA because CARPHA is committed to maintaining our relationship for the long-term, in order to address a range of public health issues towards improving health and saving lives.\u201d Professor Neil Squires, Director of Global Operations, UKHSA added \u201cI am very pleased to sign this agreement with CARPHA as we further develop an equal partnership of shared learning, focused on common challenges to protect people\u2019s health.\u201d<\/p>\n \n The MoU includes commitments to define strategies for combatting\u00a0 infectious disease threats, non-communicable diseases, strengthening outbreak response, building laboratory and workforce capacity, and improving healthy safer tourism, given the highly\u00a0 tourism dependant economies of UK Overseas Territories in the Region. There is specific emphasis on genomic surveillance of high priority pathogens which emerged as a new service during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are also plans of building\u00a0 more capacity to deal with antimicrobial resistance and lessons learned will be shared across field epidemiology and laboratory training programmes at CARPHA and UKHSA.<\/p>\n \n The UKHSA visited CARPHA\u2019s Headquarters and met with CARPHA\u2019s technical team in April 2022 and March 2023 to identify and expand on the areas of collaboration for improving health security.\u00a0 Dr. Natalie Wright and Professor Squires met with CARPHA\u2019s Executive Management team in April 2023 in the margins of the 67th<\/sup>\u00a0Annual Health Research Conference to advance discussions.\u00a0 The UKHSA\u00a0 supported\u00a0 CARPHA with secondments in communicable disease surveillance and field epidemiology training programmes from January to March 2023.<\/p>\n \n Further information<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 22\u00a0May\u00a0 2023.\u00a0\u00a0The Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to work together in preventing disease, promoting, and protecting public health. This agreement builds on…","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":303241,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,77,235,9,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","category-homepage","category-homepage-carousel","category-news","category-regional"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n