The Bahamas: Seventy Years of Believing the Islands Deserved Better Medicine

How one privately held hospital system became the standard-bearer for healthcare across the Caribbean — and why it is still building

The story of serious medicine in the Bahamas begins, improbably, with a RAF Wing Commander. During the Second World War, Dr. Meyer Rassin was stationed in Nassau, assigned to general medical duties at the Royal Air Force hospital. He saw the need. He stayed. When the Bahamian government initially refused his postwar application to remain and practice — a decision widely attributed at the time to antisemitism, and reversed after public pressure and front-page coverage in the Nassau Tribune — Rassin spent the intervening years treating patients who had nowhere else to go, including those with leprosy who had been exiled from Bahamian society. In 1955, he and his wife Rosetta, a surgical nurse, opened the Rassin Hospital: 24 beds, 20,000 square feet, the most modern private medical facility in the West Indies.

What began in 1955 as the vision of one surgeon has grown into a network of two full-service hospitals, clinics, urgent care centers, pharmacies, laboratories, and an air ambulance fleet — a comprehensive healthcare system across the Bahamas. After Dr. Rassin’s passing, a group of Bahamian physicians bought the facility in 1986 and renamed it Doctors Hospital. They completed a $8.5 million expansion in 1993, took the company public on the Bahamas International Securities Exchange in 1999, and have not stopped growing since. Today the system is known as Doctors Hospital Health System — DHHS — and it is the anchor of private healthcare not just in Nassau but across the archipelago.

The credential that anchors its reputation is the one hardest to fake. In 2010, Doctors Hospital became the first healthcare institution in the Caribbean to achieve Joint Commission International accreditation — the global benchmark for patient safety and clinical quality — and has now earned that distinction six consecutive times. JCI is the international arm of the same body that certifies hospitals across the United States; its standards do not curve for geography or island logistics. The accreditation requires intensive external review every three years, and a hospital that has passed six times running has built a culture, not just a checklist.

JCI is the international arm of the U.S.-based Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations — the same body that certifies more than 21,000 hospitals in the United States. For a North American traveler, a yacht crew member, or a seasonal resident who ends up at Doctors Hospital after something goes wrong, that means the clinical protocols, the medication management practices, the nursing standards and the patient safety culture will be recognizably continuous with what they would find at an accredited hospital on the East Coast.

That connection to the American medical establishment is not incidental. In January 2021, Doctors Hospital and Cleveland Clinic formalized a strategic advisory relationship with the explicit goal of expanding and improving healthcare delivery in the Bahamas — giving Doctors Hospital access to Cleveland Clinic’s network of internal experts for strategic planning, clinical education, and leadership development, with core teams from both institutions meeting in focused working sessions throughout the year. The collaboration is designed to expand outpatient services and develop centers of clinical excellence in the Bahamas where Cleveland Clinic’s resources offer acceleration and support. Cleveland Clinic is not a marketing partner here; it is a working one.

The network has since extended across the Caribbean in a different direction. In early 2024, Doctors Hospital and Health City Cayman Islands announced a formal collaboration for complex off-island patient care, creating a referral pathway for Bahamian patients requiring services not available locally — with coordinating physicians remaining in contact across both institutions throughout a patient’s treatment and recovery. That partnership deepened further: in February 2025, Health City — part of the globally renowned Narayana Health network founded by cardiac surgeon Dr. Devi Shetty — acquired a formal equity stake in Doctors Hospital Health System, making it the first partnership between two fully JCI-accredited private hospitals in the Caribbean.

Then there is the question of Grand Bahama — and what Hurricane Dorian made unavoidable.

When Dorian made landfall as a Category 5 storm on September 1, 2019, it did not pass. It sat on Grand Bahama for more than forty hours, driving storm surges measured in some locations at over twenty feet. The Rand Memorial Hospital in Freeport was knocked substantially offline. Clinics across the island were destroyed or shuttered. The gap between what Grand Bahama had and what it needed in the months that followed was not abstract — it was people managing chronic conditions with interrupted care, elective procedures indefinitely postponed, and a population that had lost confidence in the durability of its own healthcare infrastructure.

Doctors Hospital treated that gap as a mandate. The system has secured financing of up to $25 million from RBC Royal Bank to construct a new state-of-the-art inpatient hospital in Grand Bahama — the Rockwell Hospital in Freeport — intended to become the system’s signature facility and a partner to the rebuilt Rand Memorial, bringing specialized private care back to an island that lost it. The Cleveland Clinic relationship is explicitly part of the planning for Grand Bahama, with the system drawing on that advisory council for quality benchmarking and long-range service delivery strategy on the island.

Beyond Grand Bahama, the system has announced expansion plans including Doctors Hospital West on Carmichael Road in Nassau, a new facility on Paradise Island, and additional medical centers at other locations across the country. The system also completed the first procedure in a new state-of-the-art catheterization lab in Nassau in February 2026 — expanding access to advanced cardiac intervention that previously required leaving the country.

Outside the main Nassau campus, Doctors Hospital already operates two outpatient centers in Grand Bahama, one urgent care center in Exuma, and several outpatient centers and retail pharmacies across New Providence. The Exuma urgent care presence matters to anyone who spends time in the central Bahamas on a vessel — it represents a reach into the Out Islands that the system is actively extending rather than contracting.

The Bahamas is an archipelago of 700 islands and cays scattered across 100,000 square miles of sea, and no hospital system can serve all of it from Nassau. What Doctors Hospital has done — through JCI accreditation maintained across seven decades of institutional change, through formal ties with Cleveland Clinic and Health City, through the deliberate decision to move into Grand Bahama after Dorian rather than away from it — is to build a system that takes the geography seriously rather than pretending it isn’t there. For the American traveler, the cruiser, the liveaboard, or the seasonal resident, that matters. The infrastructure is real, the credentials are verifiable, and the system is still building.

Sources drawn from: Cleveland Clinic newsroom, Eye Witness News (Nassau), Bahamianology, Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce, Cayman Compass, Cayman Marl Road, Caribbean Medical News, and the hospital’s own institutional record.