Those were the words of Proprietor of Bougainvillea Clinic, Dr Heskith A. Vanterpool during the one-year anniversary celebration of the clinic’s catheterisation laboratory (cath lab) on Saturday, October 26, 2019.

‘Mercenaries’

Dr Vanterpool said there is a company who has set up shop at the Dr D. Orlando Smith Hospital, formerly called the Peebles Hospital, who are bent on undermining his business.

“I believe it is wrong. I have seen it over the years, where people have been an obstruction to the local people developing your services and wanting to bring people from outside. I call upon the politicians, current and past, I call upon the people in the Ministry of Health, both past and present, to try and recognise, that to allow the local people, to allow the cooperation with the Caribbean brothers and sisters to offer these services in the BVI,” he said.

According to Dr Vanterpool, the ‘mercenaries’ are “picking up cardiac patients [and] discouraging them from coming to Bougainvillea cath lab or to Bougainvillea services and sending them to the United States, offering to save this country money. They have certainly haven’t been saving you money.”

He continued, “For a single phone call, they are charging exorbitant prices. The leader of this group is not even a medical practitioner but walks up and down in Peebles Hospital, where I pay my taxes to maintain.”

Help me!

Dr Vanterpool then urged the government to help him in this fight.

“It is not an NDP thing; it is not a VIP thing. We have one cath lab that is functional in the British Virgin Islands right now, and it is doing an excellent job,” he remarked.

To validate his point, Dr Vanterpool said his one-year-old cath lab has conducted 69 coronary angiograms, inserted pacemakers, intra-cardiac defibrillators and drained large pericardial effusions.