The region's largest patient pool, and its deepest research bench.

Why Jamaica

Jamaica gives a sponsor two things no other CARICOM territory offers together: a population of 2.8 million — by far the largest recruitable base in the English-speaking Caribbean — and a research institute with a seventy-year record of work that changed international clinical guidelines. This is not an emerging research market. It is an established one that industry has simply overlooked.

The disease burden

Jamaica's obesity burden is overwhelmingly carried by women: 48.8% of adult women meet the obesity threshold against 18.5% of men. For obesity and cardiometabolic protocols this is operationally significant — it shapes screening yield, sex-balance planning and subgroup power in ways a headline national figure conceals. Hypertension control at 19.1% means four in five hypertensive patients are uncontrolled and therefore protocol-eligible.

Sites and infrastructure

• University Hospital of the West Indies, Mona — 579 beds, Type A regional referral and teaching hospital, opened 1953
• Kingston Public Hospital — the largest public acute facility
• UWI Mona, Faculty of Medical Sciences — the founding UWI medical faculty
• Caribbean Institute for Health Research (CAIHR) — the region's flagship research institute, housing the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit, Epidemiology Research Unit and Sickle Cell Unit
• An eight-bed inpatient metabolic and clinical trials ward at the TMRU — genuine Phase I/early-phase capability, rare anywhere in the region

Research heritage

The Tropical Metabolism Research Unit, founded 1958 by Sir John Waterlow with UK MRC funding, cut child malnutrition mortality from 25% to 5% by the 1970s and shaped WHO malnutrition treatment guidelines. The Jamaica Sickle Cell Cohort Study (1973–1981) was a newborn-screening cohort whose data underpinned the NIH (1987), WHO (2006) and UN (2008) declarations of sickle cell disease as a global public health priority. The Jamaican 1986 Birth Cohort and its successor JA KIDS (2011) are national perinatal cohorts run through the Epidemiology Research Unit.

Regulatory & ethics

• Ministry of Health & Wellness, Standards and Regulation Division — Pharmaceutical and Regulatory Affairs Unit
• Advisory Panel on Ethics & Medico-Legal Affairs (APEMLA), MOHW — mandatory review for higher-risk research categories
• Mona Campus Research Ethics Committee (MCREC), housed in the Faculty of Medical Sciences

The honest position: Jamaica has the most developed ethics architecture in CARICOM — a national advisory panel with defined mandatory categories plus an established university REC. Build in the APEMLA review step at protocol planning rather than start-up; it is the single most common cause of avoidable delay here.

Data quality: Strong on research infrastructure and heritage; moderate on current surveillance — WHO flagged incomplete vital registration for Jamaica in 2021.

How this site fits the network

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

Our Jamaica 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.