Gladys Gafoor

For­mer In­dus­tri­al Court judge Gladys Gafoor who sub­mit­ted a de­tailed re­port to trans­form the health sec­tor some five years ago, will be part of the tri­bunal in­to the death of Chrys­tal Boodoo-Ram­soomair.

The 29-year-old moth­er of three died at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal on March 4 af­ter un­der­go­ing a third Cae­sare­an Sec­tion. Med­ical sources said the oth­er se­lect­ed peo­ple in­clud­ed chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NWRHA) Clau­dine Shep­pard, Celia Hop­son, a nurse as­signed to the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex, Mt Hope, Dr Bharat Bas­saw, se­nior lec­tur­er/Ob­stet­rics & Gy­nae­col­o­gy/Co­or­di­na­tor (Obs&Gyn), of the Fac­ul­ty of Med­ical Sci­ences of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, and Guyanese na­tion­al Dr San­tosh Kulka­ni, a se­nior lec­tur­er in fe­male med­ical sci­ence in the Fac­ul­ty of Med­ical Sci­ences at the Mona Cam­pus, Ja­maica, of the Uni­ver­si­ty of West In­dies.

Sources said let­ters of ap­point­ments out­lin­ing the terms of ref­er­ence were hand­ed out around 11 am yes­ter­day. In 2007 Gafoor, who head­ed the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to the Op­er­a­tions and De­liv­ery of Pub­lic Health Care Ser­vices, sub­mit­ted a re­port con­tained in three vol­umes. The in­quiry, which took two years to com­plete, was then of­fi­cial­ly hand­ed over to Pres­i­dent George Maxwell Richards on June 13, 2007. To date, no of­fi­cial ac­tion has been tak­en to im­ple­ment its rec­om­men­da­tions which in­clude ad­dress­ing chron­ic short-staffing at all pub­lic health in­sti­tu­tions and im­prov­ing the lev­el of an­te­na­tal care. Among those who gave ev­i­dence were for­mer health min­is­ter John Ra­hael.