THE annual Dr Ena Thomas Memorial Symposium and Lecture at the Jamaica Pegasus on Sunday, November 24 this year is already gaining much attention and interest, organisers have said.

This year’s lecture will mark the 40th anniversary of the prestigious programme on the medical calendar in Kingston. Every year, the event explores a particular clinical theme, and this year’s theme will be ‘Sexual Health Awareness’.

Dr Ena Thomas, an outstanding graduate of Wolmer’s Girls School and the University of Aberdeen, became a member of the Royal College of Physicians (UK).

As a beloved and brilliant consultant physician at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) for over 17 years, her career was cut short when she died soon after returning from a World Health Organisation Fellowship in Copenhagen where she specialised in the management of hypertension, cerebrovascular diseases and stroke.

At her passing, the late Dr Leila Wynter-Wedderburn, the first Senior Medical Officer at the Bustamante Hospital for Children and her colleagues, established an annual Memorial Lecture, the first of it kind in Jamaica, as an appropriate tribute to her life and work.

The initiative steadily blossomed into an annual memorial lecture and symposium, as well as an annual memorial prize for an outstanding graduate nurse at the KPH.

The late Sir Florizel Glasspole as Governor General of Jamaica in 1974 unveiled a bronze plaque to Dr Thomas’s memory in William Ward at the KPH. This was an unprecedented happening in the annals of the KPH.

The annual memorial lecture and symposium customarily bring state of the art clinical, diagnostic, and therapeutic knowledge to the medical fraternity.

Each year Jamaican consultants are joined by the best from the Americas and Europe, thereby helping to sustain an international community to advance medical knowledge and to impact the many global medical challenges with evidence-based solutions. Several world leaders in medicine have graced the podium. This year’s guest lecturer will be Professor Valerie Mongomery-Rice, MD, FACOG, Dean of the Faculty at Morehouse Medical School in Atlanta, Georgia.