The Caribbean aspect of Dr. Lewis's dental career began in 1971 when he returned to Jamaica after having received undergraduate and postgraduate training at the University of Leeds Dental School, Yorkshire, England and the Leeds Dental Hospital where he was appointed Registrar in Oral Surgery in 1970. He was successful in the examinations of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of both England and Edinburgh and holds fellowships of both those institutions.

His first appointment in Jamaica was to commission the Department of Dental and Oral Surgery at the Bustamante Hospital for Children. While there, he taught extraction techniques to the students at the Dental Auxilliary School which was newly established on adjoining premises.

Dr. Lewis was then appointed Consultant Oral Surgeon at the Kingston Public Hospital in 1973 where he worked until 1999. His work during this period has been collated by his colleague Dr. Christopher Ogunsalu in his seminal work, "Jaw Tumours of Jamaica", which earned Dr. Ogunsalu his Master of Science degree from the University of London, England.

In 1999 Dr. Lewis was appointed Director of Dental Services at the Ministry of Health. While there he presided over the accreditation of the Dental Auxilliary School to tertiary status by the University Council of Jamaica. He also was responsible for the expansion of the range of dental services offered in the Government Dental Service.

Dr. Lewis came to prominence as a Caribbean figure during the meeting of forty Caribbean dentists, held in St. Lucia in 1975 under the auspices of PAHO. That meeting was the springboard for the formation of the Caribbean Atlantic Regional Dental Association (CARDA) in 1977. Dr. Lewis was elected the founding president and was president for eleven years. CARDA has been the motivating force in the advancement of public health dentistry in the Caribbean, culminating in the establishment of the Dental School of the University of the West Indies, Mount Hope, Trinidad. Dr. Lewis represented CARDA on the task force which planned the dental school. Another noteworthy success of CARDA has been the fluoridation of table salt in Jamaica in 1987. This public health measure was pivotal in reducing the DMFT index of 12 year- olds in Jamaica, from a value of 6.76 in 1987, to 1.02 in 1996.

Dr. Lewis retired from the Ministry of Health in 2003 when he was invited by the University of the West Indies Health Centre to set up a Dental Clinic to treat 14,000 students of the university under a managed health care model. That clinic has just successfully completed one year of operation.