Meet David Walcott, a medical doctor and entrepreneur with over five years of experience as a founder and consultant of multiple businesses in the Caribbean.
Walcott is the founder of NovaMed, a company providing innovative healthcare solutions in emerging markets, according to Forbes. He started the company in 2018 to help transform healthcare services, medical education, and health innovation in the Caribbean.
The company has a medical education arm called First Step, which has grown to become a one-stop shop for medical students and doctors in the Caribbean and Latin America who want to access further 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.”
In addition to NovaMed, Walcott is a founding partner of the Visionaries Summit, a platform that manages and convenes a global community controlling over $140 billion in investment, according to Forbes.
His decision to combine healthcare with entrepreneurship was influenced by his instinct for identifying problems and an innate ability to create innovative solutions. More importantly, he is creating a path for other professionals to find their own way.
He was recently recognized by Forbes, which named him among the next generation of black leaders and entrepreneurs to look out for. He has also been recognized by the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and the IMF.
Walcott was also recently appointed to the advisory board of University College London’s Global Business School for Health (UCL GBSH) – the world’s first business school exclusively dedicated to health and healthcare management, according to the Jamaican-Gleaner. He was the youngest person and the only person of African descent on the 11-member external advisory board.
He obtained his first medical degree at The University of the West Indies as a Campion College graduate and worked at Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), where he got exposed to the rigors of the local public health system. He also got first-hand experience of the challenges that existed 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.”