Dr. Myron Rolle has attained his goal. He successfully crowdfunded $200,000 to help fund the CARICOM Neurosurgical Initiative (CNI) to implement solutions to solve the issue of neurosurgical disease across the Caribbean.

A $3,675 donation by Sean Pittman on Friday, July 9, pushed Rolle to his goal, from 160 donors, which allowed Rolle to begin to take the steps he needed to ensure Caribbean residents have equitable access to quality and timely neurosurgical care, which includes aiming to improve public policy, develop clinical practice, and build research and education capacity.

The donations did not stop, pushing the account up to $202,305 as of Sunday.

“We aim to promote government engagement and facilitate ongoing support for neurosurgery as a strategic national priority,” Rolle told The Nassau Guardian of the initiative scheduled for a January 2022 start.

Rolle expects to be in New Providence for eight weeks at the kickoff, managing it from the ground, followed by stints in Barbados, then Guyana.

“We aim to establish a sustainable framework for the sharing of best practices, sharing of clinical knowledge and promotion of novel modalities to treat a variety of neurosurgical diseases. We aim to facilitate collaboration in understanding the regional neurosurgical disease burden, catalyze organically produced research, and expand neurosurgical coverage through educational tools devoted to task shifting of frontline healthcare workers.”

The CNI will be operated under the Caribbean Neurosurgery Foundation, Inc. and the Myron L. Rolle Foundation.

Rolle, a fourth-year neurosurgery resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, created the GoFundMe page on May 13, to jumpstart fundraising. Donations can also be made at the Caribbean Neurosurgery Foundation, Inc. website at www.caribbeannf.org.

The donations will assist in covering visiting professorship costs (supporting the travel and logistics of visiting professors to bring their clinical research expertise to a CARICOM nation). The goal of the visiting professorship program is to share knowledge, skills, and best practices with fellow providers and students to expand the neurosurgical capacity in the region; surgical equipment costs (purchasing, implementing and maintaining new surgical equipment to allow medical staff in the Caribbean to operate without resource-related limitations); virtual neurotrauma teaching module costs (utilizing the professional virtual space to educate and train nurses around CARICOM regarding neurotrauma task shifting to expand neurosurgical coverage – especially in the more remote, vulnerable islands); production of public service announcements (PSAs) to prevent traumatic brain injury (leveraging media resources to develop, produce and air PSAs unique to each CARICOM nation to advocate for preventative measures and create awareness around the potential harm to children and adults alike); and government and major stakeholder policy meeting costs (supporting the travel and logistics of policy advocates to present and implement policy items to the government officials and major stakeholders of CARICOM nations). The goal of the policy meetings he said is to effectively address gaps in neurosurgical care further upstream, (so as to prevent catastrophic consequences); neurotrauma registry costs (collating patient data in a shared, secured place to inform clinical management and influence policy around neurosurgical disease); and CNI fund operations (administrative and operational costs).

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