An­na-Lisa Paul

The med­ical in­tern, who lied about be­ing robbed at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal (POS­GH) two weeks ago, has been fired.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh yes­ter­day an­nounced the woman's dis­missal from the Min­istry of Health.

Pro­vid­ing an up­date on the mat­ter as he at­tend­ed a func­tion host­ed by Re­birth House at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence, Ma­coya, yes­ter­day, Deyals­ingh said the de­ci­sion was made on­ly af­ter a thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the mat­ter.

Deyals­ingh said the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was done in a com­pas­sion­ate and firm man­ner.

The min­is­ter promised he would soon deal with the is­sue of se­cu­ri­ty as "there were le­git­i­mate con­cerns which need to be ad­dressed."

The woman fab­ri­cat­ed a sto­ry on Oc­to­ber 23, claim­ing she had been robbed on the com­pound of the hos­pi­tal, prompt­ing her col­leagues at the fa­cil­i­ty to threat­en to take in­dus­tri­al ac­tion by with­hold­ing ser­vices.

Deyals­ingh said a team, com­pris­ing the min­istry's per­ma­nent sec­re­tary, chief med­ical of­fi­cer, le­gal of­fi­cer and hu­man re­sources of­fi­cer, was as­sem­bled to in­ves­ti­gate and ad­vise on the mat­ter.

"As min­is­ter, I have an over­ar­ch­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­tect the in­tegri­ty of the pub­lic health care sys­tem."

Se­nior med­ical of­fi­cials said it was sad the woman had so "cav­a­lier­ly thrown away" af­ter years of ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing.

How­ev­er, they re­newed the call for stricter eval­u­a­tions and men­tal health as­sess­ments to be done on peo­ple en­ter­ing the field and cur­rent­ly in train­ing, as they said it was a pos­si­bil­i­ty the in­tern might have need­ed pro­fes­sion­al help in that area.

On the is­sue of sui­cide, the min­is­ter said, that was an area which could not be ad­dressed "flip­pant­ly" but re­quired "deep, deep in­tro­spec­tion."

He said the Men­tal Health Unit was look­ing at the mat­ter and would of­fer pro­pos­als soon on how that could be achieved.

Point­ing out that the au­thor­i­ties had to con­sid­er all the fac­tors in­volved, he ques­tioned if too much pres­sure was be­ing placed on chil­dren to fo­cus on pass­ing ex­ams and grow­ing up too soon as they deal with so­cial fac­tors, such as peer pres­sure, teenage preg­nan­cy and so­cial/aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance.

Mi­cro­cephaly ba­by "do­ing well"

Mean­while, Deyals­ingh said T&T's first ba­by born with mi­cro­cephaly as a re­sult of the Zi­ka virus re­mains at home in the care of her par­ents.

He said the min­istry had be­gun per­form­ing tests to de­ter­mine if the ba­by's hear­ing was im­paired.

"She is do­ing as well as can be ex­pect­ed at this time," he added.

Deyals­ingh said the of­fer of fi­nan­cial aid from the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment was ap­pre­ci­at­ed by the fam­i­ly.