JUST five years after graduating from medical school in 2018, Dr Stephan Neill took the bold step of launching his own medical practice in August 2023 with the aim of making his office a “one-stop shop” for patient care. Now, just over a year since its inception, Dr Neill is focused on expanding Critical Care Comprehensive Centre, driven by his mission to ensure patients truly feel heard and cared for.

When Neill graduated from Kingston College in 2013 he was among a group who created history, as it was the first time that the school had six graduates who were accepted into medical school at The University of the West Indies in one year.

Five years later Neill, who shared that he had a love for biology from a young age, graduated from medical school and spent time working in the public and private health sectors, including three years in the Accident and Emergency Department at University Hospital of West Indies.

“I was that one relative, from a very young age, who was able to tell everybody how a plant operated, how animals functioned, genealogy and things like that, and that sort of developed over time into a love for medicine, really through the loss of my maternal grandmother,” Dr Neill, the chief medical director of Critical Care Comprehensive Centre at Matilda’s Corner Plaza on Old Hope Road, told the Jamaica Observer.

“It created a sense of what could be done to assist people out there in terms of their health care and what it is that can be offered, what is actually offered and how well I could bridge that gap with my particular interest and the particular personality traits that would make me good for medicine,” added Dr Neill.

He explained that his exposure to family business, alongside his entrepreneurial spirit and love for family medicine led him to start his own medical practice.

“With my exposure in the public system — spending one year as an intern, one year as a senior house officer, and a few years as a medical officer in Accident and Emergency — I found that I really had a very deep interest in family medicine because I found that the aspect of medicine that allows me to teach and to impart certain critical tenets of health to prevent disease processes was something I did pretty well. And so, as a result, I just really gravitated to family medicine,” he said.

He explained that he built his practice on developing a special relationship with all patients who visit, not only providing physical care but full assistance with any issue relating to their medical condition.

“When my clients come here we deal with everything for them, down to the appointments. So if I have to refer a patient outside of here, we will make all the appointments, we will do all the follow-ups to make sure that all the results are in on time through our administration; and the more I do it, is the more I love it,” he told the Sunday Observer.

“We take very special pride in making sure that our clients, our family, they feel [that] we haven’t forgotten them. So I take time out once per week, every week, as an appointment is scheduled to call my clients, especially those who have outstanding reviews, those I haven’t heard from in a little while or those who might be going through different emotional components as it relates to what’s happening with them. That has really been a major benefit or major perk to being a member of the critical care family,” Neill added.

The young doctor explained that he wanted to create a practice that is diverse and provides a wide range of services to patients, making health care easily accessible for many.

“We started as a multi-speciality centre, so we offer physiotherapy, we also have our laboratory testing, screenings, like pap smears; we do vaccinations for immigration reasons, ECGs as well as blood tests, wound care, and also, through my particular exposure in accident and emergency, I am able to deal with what I consider low-risk emergencies; so asthma attacks, lacerations, simple fractures and so on, we can deal with those here quite easily, with my experience and the way the place is outfitted. So I like to call this a one-stop shop,” he said.

Additionally he does home visits and last summer participated in a number of health fairs and shared medical advice at community events, among them the back-to-school fair hosted by Edge 105FM presenter Burgerman at Devon House in St Andrew, Portmore Village heath fair, and Sandy Park presentation and health fair.

Looking ahead, Neill said in the next five years his main aim is to open at least one other branch in Jamaica to widen the scope of service to more Jamaicans while making his medical centre more accessible for more patients.

“The practice is really set up as an urgent care type centre and we are able to manage a lot of those mild emergencies, so there is really a niche for that in the market right now. We could have a medical facility or a quasi-hospital where patients can come and can be treated and a lot of the times have full resolution without ever having to go to hospital, and it’s important that we create multiple avenues and multiple opportunities for our clients to access that type of care and that type of service,” he said.