Meet David Walcott, a medical doctor and entrepreneur with over five years of experience as the founder and consultant of several Caribbean firms.
According to Forbes, Walcott is the founder of NovaMed, a company that provides innovative healthcare solutions in underdeveloped regions. In 2018, he founded the company with the goal of transforming healthcare services, medical education, and health innovation in the Caribbean.
First Step, the company’s medical education branch, has expanded to become a one-stop shop for medical students and professionals in the Caribbean and Latin America seeking additional training to advance their careers.
“I was going to specialize in plastic surgery and had been exploring a series of schools abroad, including Colombia and Harvard, for which I had to do very well in application exams,” he told the Jamaican Observer about what influenced him.
“I ended up doing quite well, performing within the 99.9 percentile, but realized that most of my peers found it difficult to access these grades and, ultimately, these institutions. I decided that I preferred the idea of creating a portal for access to world-class medical education for the region to specialize in and, therein, First Step was born.”
According to Forbes, Walcott is a founding partner of the Visionaries Summit, a platform that organizes and convenes a worldwide community with over $140 billion in investment.
His talent for detecting problems and an instinctive capacity to find inventive solutions prompted his decision to merge healthcare and entrepreneurship. More importantly, he is paving the way for other experts to follow in his footsteps.
He was recently chosen by Forbes as one of the future generation of black leaders and entrepreneurs to watch. He has also received recognition from the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund.
According to the Jamaican-Gleaner, Walcott was recently named to the advisory board of University College London’s Global Business School for Health (UCL GBSH), the world’s first business school completely dedicated to health and healthcare management. On the 11-member external advisory board, he was the youngest and the only person of African descent.
As a Campion College alumnus, he earned his first medical degree from The University of the West Indies and worked at Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), where he was exposed to the rigors of the local public health system. He also received firsthand knowledge of the difficulties that prevailed there.
“Life in public hospitals can be stressful and overwhelming, and medical professionals sometimes disconnect from their duty to public care, resulting in compromised patient care,” he told the Jamaican Observer. “In times of peak stress, I learned to reconnect with my empathy for my patients by reminding myself that everyone has someone who cares about them. Every patient is someone’s child.”
