Just what the doctor ordered
Family physician Jodine Jackto-Tafari on why authenticity matters; growing her diagnostics business
Published:Sunday | March 23, 2025 | 9:38 PMOmar Tomlinson - Contributor
A prescription of relatable warmth, administered with doses of direct honesty, are Dr Jodi Jackto-Tafari’s distinct calling cards.
The family physician’s endearing personality has secured fierce loyalty among patients, so much so that patient retention at her St James-based practice, Sekhmet Medical Center, is understandably high. While in a medical capacity, she believes her ‘secret sauce’ that keeps patients returning is authenticity.
“I wear my emotions on my sleeve and tell you how it is. I tell you the plain truth, and patients love that. Apart from that is discernment, and that’s a gift. I don’t think I could have asked or wished for that. Patients would come in, and sometimes they are saying something, but it’s not really what is going on. It is your discernment. Doctors are social scientists. They just have to learn how to discern well,” a proud Jackto-Tafari declared of her now six-year-old multidoctor business in Bogue, Montego Bay, which also houses other medical practitioners. Among them are a gynaecologist, paediatrician, neurosurgeon, orthopaedic surgeon, and nutritionist.
What sets Sekhmet apart, the doctor-turned-businesswomen posited, “is mostly our customer service and attention to detail”. This company’s ethos continues to pay professional and personal dividends.
Growing up in Mineral Heights, Clarendon, with her late brother Morris, who, tragically, passed in 1999 in a vehicular accident shortly after graduating from The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, the then-young siblings would repeatedly see their educator mother Jacqueline Wollery selflessly care for less fortunate children in the community. It left a lasting imprint.
“My mother would take them in, feed and clothe them, and love on them, and they would stay with me. I knew then when I was eight [that] I wanted to do something that would have an impact,” she recalled of the inflexion point when her conscious mind directed her towards medicine. “Ever since I’ve known myself, I always loved the sciences and math. As a small child, when everyone was fearful of science, I was the one excelling at it. I’m a free spirit, I like to do what I love,” she noted in a lively afternoon discourse with The Sunday Gleaner in the upstairs office of her secondary business, Accu Lab, a medical diagnostics facility located next door to Sekhmet Medical.
Were it not for her currently practising medicine, she revealed: “I would have chosen teaching just because of the impact. I just understood at a very early age what a blessing it is to have an effect on people. Once you live that life of service, you can’t undo it, you have to live in that way, so I knew it was something that would grant me a similar feeling.”
A Glenmuir High School alum, Jackto-Tafari fondly strolled down memory lane of her secondary school experience, completing sixth form at the Hampton School for girls in St Elizabeth: “I was an A student for the most part. There were subjects that really didn’t resonate with me, so I didn’t do them. I am hard-headed, so I will do what I like and leave the rest. I feel like we should water the grass for the soil we grow most in, so Spanish and subjects like those were not my forte.”
She departed The Rock at 16 for North America to pursue her medicinal studies at Saint Augustine’s College in North Carolina but thoughts of home burned bright.
“I decided I wanted to study in the States to see what that would afford me, in a First World country. Upon getting there, I realised that I was able to top my class, do DNA research, go up against students from Ivy League universities from all over and still come out on top. I would have won All-American Scholar, presidential scholarships, I would have done it all, but Jamaica is where I wanted to be. It is my home base. This is where I wanted to make the impact.”
Homeward bound at 22, she went on to complete med school at UWI Mona and hearkened back to being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when she commenced work at Cornwall Regional Hospital.
“I would have, early, been given big duties. Everybody noticed my drive and love for medicine. I would be alone in the emergency room sometimes and also alone in rural clinics in the rural areas of Maroon Town, Adelphi, Barrett Town, and Cambridge.”
Her easygoing bedside manner and consistent use of Jamaican vernacular in communication proved an effective combination in winning the hearts of patients.
“I would be given huge tasks, If you were to ask the seniors, they would tell you,” Jackto-Tafari reminisced of her residency.
It was at this juncture that she weighed options to further her medical career, leaning towards paediatrics and neonatology. But while doing so, she discovered there was a bun in the oven.
“At one point, I settled on paediatrics neonatology because it seemed hard to most, but I knew I could do it. I had that struggle. Stopping your studies before you feel like you could have maxed out is a huge decision, but it’s the type of sacrifice that I wanted to make,” she reflected on the speciality interest she did not pursue.
“It’s when I went on maternity leave that I realised even though I loved neonatology, how much the people loved me. The office that I worked in for a few months, the place started to fill up. And I was able to empower, encourage, and kind of nurture the people into understanding themselves and understanding illness. [I shared] how to prevent illnesses and how to accurately treat [them] using analogies that Jamaicans would be used to. I realised how much of an impact that was making.”
The mother of three boys, Kyan, Negasi, and Omowale, opted to remain a general practitioner. But does the decision sit comfortably now with Jackto-Tafari years later?
“Oh absolutely! I am very happy with that choice,” she affirmed. “I have never regretted that. It was one of the hardest decisions. Believe me, it was very, very difficult, but one of the most satisfying things I have ever embarked on.”
After spending more than a decade in the public sector and also working as a concierge at hotels, and other doctors’ private practices, the physician shifted focus. She made an entrepreneurial leap of faith.
“In 2018, I partnered with an ultrasonographer in downtown Montego Bay and started to see the everyday Jamaican as I always wanted to, and that went well,” she told The Sunday Gleaner. “The place filled up, but I didn’t like how it was being managed, so I decided to open my own space in 2019. I scouted the entire place, but there was a doctor on every corner, and my ethics wouldn’t allow me to go next door to another physician, so I found a space which I thought was big enough to accommodate what I wanted, so we opened Sekhmet Medical Center here at the ATL Plaza in Bogue.”
Speaking about the balancing act of being a doctor and businesswoman, and whether there are any obstacles, she offered: “We don’t do a lot of business studies being on the science track,” she shared. A perennial bookworm, Jackto-Tafari explained that to counter her business-aligned shortcomings, “I am always studying and deliberate about courses. Right now, I am signed up [for] about four. Whether it is speaking, business management, accounting, financial planning, [or] project management, I am always doing a course. It’s the Aquarian age, it’s 2025. Knowledge is everywhere. It’s just for us to be deliberate and grab it.”
What the savvy doc also grabbed was the opportunity to tap into other business ventures.
During the pandemic, she saw a spike in patient referrals from business proprietors in the Second City.
“They trust us with their families and their whole lives, and so when COVID came around, these business persons would say to employees, ‘Go to Dr Tafari. She’s taking care of you.’ So at Sekhmet, we saw a lot of people through COVID and got the chance to enhance and maintain their business. We had to open a new space for COVID testing, and then after the pandemic, we wanted to do something else with this space. With my biochem background, and with the knowledge that diagnostics is a big hindrance to our success in medicine here in Jamaica, I decided to expand there.”
She opened AccuLab in 2022, smartly eyeing the viability of diagnostics services given the existent gaps in the local industry.
First on the market under the name Sekhmet Medical Labs in 2021 and providing COVID-19 testing at the time, the business underwent a name change to Accu Lab Diagnostics in 2022 to host a wider range of biomedical tests.
AccuLabs, she explained, offers a diverse slate of tests “There is haematology, special chemistry, immunology, endocrinology, pathology, oncology, allergy testing, microbiology, bacteria and fungus testing, even cutting-edge stuff like gut PCR, genetic testing. We do all of it at Sekhmet and Acculabs.”
Turnaround times for results are fast but vary depending on the type of tests being done. There are same-day and next-day offerings for routine tests.
However, she noted that “some tests like a bacteria culture, say you have a urinary tract infection or something like that, naturally you have to wait because bacteria has to grow, so that doesn’t change. But for the ones that can, like your biopsy results, not two weeks but a few days, not a year, or six months.”
Within a relatively short three-year span, she has grown Accu Lab from the initial location at Bogue to three additional sites at East Street in downtown Montego Bay; Mount Salem, St James, and Falmouth, Trelawny.
Her vision for the diagnostics brand is to expand even further and become a familiar presence across the island. “We plan to have multiple locations over the next two years blanketing Jamaica,” she disclosed to The Sunday Gleaner.
Having achieved her own mushrooming success in business, the 41-year-old physician would love others from a trajectory similar to where she began, to also follow suit.
“For a doctor who has entrepreneurial dreams, and we have a lot of bright doctors in Jamaica, I want them to understand that they shouldn’t be fearful to take up space,” she advised. “They should, indeed, take up space to dream, to execute. And live big. A lot of times we compress ourselves into I’m just a scientist or I am just a doctor, but these are some very bright minds. They have to understand that there is so much life to be had on the other side of fear. There is so much happiness and contentment to be had on the other side of fear.”