Kevon Felmine

The alarm sys­tem at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal was turned off be­fore thieves made off with a $.5 mil­lion ul­tra­sound ma­chine on Au­gust 7, the CEO of the South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA), Anil Go­sine, said yes­ter­day.He was as­ton­ished nev­er­the­less that al­though not all lo­ca­tions around the hos­pi­tal were cov­ered by more than 100 video cam­eras, the thieves still got away with the size­able piece of ma­chin­ery.

In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Go­sine told the T&T Guardian the ma­chine was yet to be found but in­ves­ti­ga­tors were mak­ing progress.He said pri­vate med­ical in­sti­tu­tions would now be tar­get­ed in the s earch for the ma­chine, since the au­thor­i­ties were con­vinced it was spir­it­ed away in a well or­gan­ised plan.Since the ma­chine's dis­ap­pear­ance, few­er sono­grams have been done at South Trinidad's main hos­pi­tal, Go­sine ad­mit­ted."We are con­tin­u­ing to try to re­cov­er it," he said.

"In fact, we have right now, our se­cu­ri­ty, along with the po­lice, try­ing to re­cov­er it and get some leads."What we can say is that there are on­ly a few nurs­ing homes/med­ical cen­tres at this point in time that would utilise ul­tra­sound ma­chines, and ob­vi­ous­ly these are the ar­eas we are look­ing at."He said in­ves­ti­ga­tions so far had un­earthed in­for­ma­tion which showed the theft was well planned and ex­e­cut­ed.

"Ap­par­ent­ly the alarm sys­tem was shut off, so this was planned," Go­sine said."The se­cu­ri­ty de­part­ment did iden­ti­fy they had alarms in cer­tain points which would have been pre­vi­ous to the ma­chine leav­ing. The alarms were nul­li­fied and it seems like it was all part of it."He said it was al­so now crit­i­cal that the RHA plugged the blind spots at the hos­pi­tal and im­proved se­cu­ri­ty pro­to­cols.

"We have cam­eras in the hos­pi­tal, but not at all lo­ca­tions," he said."We have over 100 cam­eras at the hos­pi­tal and we are in the process of in­creas­ing the num­ber of cam­eras to all ar­eas of the hos­pi­tal."Now we have an ex­ten­sion, with the Chancery Lane Hos­pi­tal Com­plex com­ing along, we will have some there al­so."He said work on the hos­pi­tal com­plex con­tin­ues and it should be up and run­ning by the end of the year.

Po­lice have not yet as­cer­tained any def­i­nite lead, but Go­sine said hos­pi­tal se­cu­ri­ty staff had be­gun in­ter­view­ing med­ical staff to find out why the ma­chine was not prop­er­ly se­cured.Ac­cord­ing to a hos­pi­tal of­fi­cial, it was last used by anaes­thetists in the sur­gi­cal the­atre of the hos­pi­tal's new wing."We have start­ed the process of look­ing at why the ma­chine was not locked down," Go­sine said."We nor­mal­ly would have these ma­chines all locked up prop­er­ly at the end of the day, wher­ev­er they were.

"The on­ly rea­son we would take out ma­chines re­al­ly is for main­te­nance and ser­vic­ing. Ma­chines are not re­al­ly loaned un­less it is loaned to an­oth­er pub­lic fa­cil­i­ty."It is moved around in the hos­pi­tal but we have oth­er ma­chines, so it will af­fect the num­ber of ul­tra­sounds, but not to a large ex­tent."Go­sine said every­thing pos­si­ble was be­ing done to re­cov­er the ma­chine.Health Min­is­ter Fuad Khan could not be reached for com­ment yes­ter­day, as calls to his phone went unan­swered.