The Caribbean's most research-ready territory.

Why Barbados

Barbados is where the region's chronic disease epidemiology was first documented properly, and it is the only CARICOM state we have identified with a continuously operating national NCD registry. For a sponsor, that means a population whose disease burden is not just severe but measured — and a site environment where the people running your study have been running studies for thirty years.

The disease burden

At 27.9% crude adult diabetes prevalence, Barbados records one of the highest rates anywhere. Hypertension affects 41.8% of adults aged 30–79, and although the 33.7% control rate is the best in this network, it still means two in three hypertensive adults are uncontrolled. Diabetes-related lower-limb amputation rates in Barbados have been documented as among the highest reported worldwide: a prospective cohort of 205 amputees followed to 2007 found five-year survival of 44% after amputation, against 82% in matched controls. That is the clinical reality your protocol would be recruiting into.

Sites and infrastructure

• Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Bridgetown — 519 beds, the island's sole secondary and tertiary facility, an accredited teaching hospital taking regional referrals
• UWI Cave Hill, Faculty of Medical Sciences — a national university medical school, not an offshore institution
• George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Centre, founded 1992 — the region's longest-running NCD research centre, part of the Caribbean Institute for Health Research
• Barbados National Registry for Chronic NCDs — active stroke (2008), heart attack (2009) and cancer (2010) surveillance; the only national NCD registry we have identified in CARICOM
• Edmund Cohen Vascular Research Laboratory at the GA-CDRC

Research heritage

The Barbados Eye Studies — landmark population-based ophthalmic epidemiology in an African-descent population, including nine-year lens-opacity incidence data. The Barbados Studies of Amputation in People with Diabetes. And ECHORN, the NIH-funded Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network, which enrolled 2,961 participants between 2013 and 2018 across Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, coordinated with Yale.

Regulatory & ethics

• Medicines regulation sits with the Barbados Drug Service (Drug Service Act 1980), with the Chief Medical Officer as Licensing Authority under the Therapeutic Substances Act 1950
• Ethics review via a joint Ministry of Health / UWI research ethics committee; the UWI Cave Hill Campus IRB served as IRB of record for ECHORN

The honest position: PAHO's Pharmaceutical Country Profile records that no legal provision requires clinical trial authorisation by the medicines regulator, and no trial registry requirement exists. In practice this means ethics approval and Ministry no-objection are the operative gates — faster than a full CTA regime, but a sponsor's compliance function will want the position documented up front. We do that as standard.

Data quality: Strong — the only network territory we have identified with an active national NCD registry, a thirty-year research centre and documented NIH-funded cohort participation.

How this site fits the network

Anchor site — established research infrastructure, national medical school, documented trial or cohort history.

Our Barbados operation is contracted, trained and monitored under the same quality system as our UK and US sites. One master service agreement covers all three regions, one budget negotiation, one set of payment terms. Sites in this network can absorb enrolment from under-recruiting UK or US centres without a new vendor qualification cycle.