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He has authored and edited seven medical books including a best selling medical textbook on echocardiography and is well respected for his body of work. But for sometime now we have not heard much about Doctor Edward Bulwer who in 1991 was the President of The Belize Diabetes Association and from 1997 to 2000 was the founder and clinical director of a medical facility in Belize.

Tonight, however, Doctor Edward Bulwer is back in the news; no he has not written a new book but has been selected as the new Chief of Medical Staff at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. Dr. Bulwer replaces Doctor Khalid Ghazy who resigned in June during the uproar over corruption in the hospital administration.

So, Bulwer is representative of a new page turned and if you have read any of his books you would know that he is no stranger to his personal belief in preventative care as opposed to pharmaceutical intervention - especially in the treatment of chronic illnesses like diabetes and hypertension. And so will that very progressive outlook have an effect on the care now given at the KHMH? According to Dr. Bulwer there will be a holistic approach to health care that ranges from education to providing the services needed to help those who are not well:....

Dr. Bernard Bulwer, Medical Chief of Staff – KHMH
“We are primarily a medical care facility. We want to look after people and their illnesses and their sickness when they come in here. But then there are some other things that we can do and we hope to do.

These are easily fixable things. If you were to ask me, I would volunteer outside of the KHMH time to do my part to help educate. But you can educate in more ways than one, you can educate as I said in the waiting room, in the outpatient clinic settings, and there are a lot of prevention messages; we could educate through Karl Heusner having our own outreach or education outreach to the public and we hope to do that.

Part of the way of offering the best healthcare services in this country is to offer the best prevention advice. If we are focused on the disease care model where all we are focusing on as a hospital is to treat then you are talking about going down the road of what you see happening in the USA. They can have the best hospital care but we also need to have the best prevention and this not only applies to diabetes. To a large measure yes there is a genetic component but the biggest contributor to diabetes, both its cause and its management is how we live.

And so we are not just talking about diabetes here, there is a lot of fuss in the media about kidney disease. Diabetes and hypertension which are brother and sister, they are all part of the package. So my philosophy, based on the standard and the cost of care I have seen abroad and based on for example we are just about to get dialysis services, those things are not, we are treat the people who are ill and need treatment, but what we really want to do is to prevent a whole host of patients for whom we simply do not have the money to treat.”

Dr. Gary Longsworth,
“Dr. Bulwer was chosen from a field of four candidates in what I would like to describe for the benefit of the press and the public as a very transparent process. We went through the applicants and we interviewed all the applicants. There was no short listing, all the applicants were interviewed. We used an objective scoring system to score the candidate anonymously by each interviewer on the panel which was a panel of 5 interviewers and all the candidates were scored. We used typed questions that were repeat for candidates to see the differences in the response to similar scenario and all of this was scored. The scores were tallied afterwards and the recommendations from that process were taken to the Board of Directors where it was reviewed once again and Dr. Bernard Bulwer was chosen.”

According to the biography provided to us today, Dr. Edward Bulwer has been recognized at Harvard and in echocardiography circles as the most unique and prolific illustrator and communicator in echocardiography having created the largest known collection of such works on the heart to date.