SABA/STATIA — Saba Cares and the St. Eustatius Health Care Foundation (SEHCF) have both joined the Dutch Caribbean Hospital Alliance (DCHA) as a member.
The DCHA was officially established in June 2022 with the hospitals of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao and St. Maarten, and later on Saba and St. Eustatius joined as medical centers. Joining the DCHA has many advantages, according to Saba Cares and the SEHCF. They said their organizations become stronger by working together with the DCHA, which in turn enables them to better serve their communities.
As a cooperation organization, the DCHA brings together the hospitals, and by extension the medical centers on Saba and Statia, to assist each other with education and training of personnel, and to further improve complex, high quality medical care. By offering more specialist medical care closer to home in Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao and St. Maarten, fewer patients have to be sent abroad to hospitals in for example Colombia and the Netherlands.
Preparations to establish the DCHA started two years before, during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the international borders closed during the pandemic, medical referrals were only possible within the Dutch Caribbean, which reinforced the collaboration between the hospitals on the islands.
