CEO of the North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) Davlin Thomas owes this coun­try an ex­pla­na­tion. If he can­not pro­vide cred­i­ble da­ta to back his claim that his de­ci­sion to ap­point a new team of doc­tors at the Cou­va Fa­cil­i­ty led to a 60 per cent de­crease in deaths and in­creased dis­charges by 25 per cent in the last eight days, he should do the ho­n­ourable thing and step down.

It is an as­tound­ing claim to make with­out any da­ta to back it up. What is worse is that by his very as­ser­tion Mr Thomas has brought in­to dis­re­pute doc­tors who had been serv­ing dili­gent­ly and du­ti­ful­ly since the pan­dem­ic start­ed at the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal, the first fa­cil­i­ty brought in­to use as a COVID-19 hos­pi­tal.

Ini­tial­ly when the doc­tors were moved Thomas claimed they were suf­fer­ing from burnout and a ro­ta­tion sys­tem was be­ing in­tro­duced.

His tune has changed since then. Is it be­cause a let­ter sent to a rel­a­tive of a de­ceased pa­tient was read on a UNC plat­form? Is this more about pol­i­tics than sav­ing lives?

Mr Thomas, who holds a mas­ter's de­gree, says his dis­ser­ta­tion fo­cused on "im­prov­ing qual­i­ty" on a plat­form of or­gan­i­sa­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion process­es. That does not in­di­cate that he has the ex­per­tise to ques­tion the ca­pa­bil­i­ty of any med­ical pro­fes­sion­al.

That is why he must ex­plain the ba­sis of the study that led to his pro­nounce­ment about the re­duc­tion in deaths at the fa­cil­i­ty af­ter the doc­tors were moved. Is he com­par­ing like pa­tients, sim­i­lar clin­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tions, sim­i­lar his­to­ry or co­mor­bidi­ties, sim­i­lar ages and sim­i­lar set­tings re­gard­ing hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tion?

Al­so, was eight days a rea­son­able time to make such con­clu­sive state­ments?

Is Mr Thomas al­leg­ing that the doc­tors who had been serv­ing du­ti­ful­ly with­out com­plaint had by neg­li­gence, in­com­pe­tence or mal­prac­tice caused the deaths of pa­tients?

If they con­tributed to deaths at the in­sti­tu­tion, their trans­fers sim­ply shift the prob­lem to an­oth­er part of the health sys­tem. A more ef­fec­tive course of ac­tion would have been to re­port their in­com­pe­tence to the med­ical board.

Mr Thomas should not get away with at­tack­ing med­ical pro­fes­sion­als with im­puni­ty. He has se­vere­ly dam­aged the rep­u­ta­tion of these doc­tors and opened the state up to pos­si­ble le­gal ac­tion.

Yes­ter­day the Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion de­scribed the CEO’s claims as "a most shock­ing sta­tis­tic" with "an even more shock­ing im­pli­ca­tion."

Ac­cord­ing to the as­so­ci­a­tion, Mr Thomas “clev­er­ly" failed to say that less crit­i­cal­ly ill pa­tients had been sent to the Cou­va fa­cil­i­ty in the past eight days while oth­ers wait­ing to be ad­mit­ted to the des­ig­nat­ed treat­ment cen­tre for crit­i­cal pa­tients have been left in the gen­er­al sys­tem where they face the risk of less favourable out­comes.

At the COVID-19 up­date yes­ter­day, nei­ther Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh nor Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram was able to back the claims made by the NCRHA CEO. They too are seek­ing fur­ther clar­i­fi­ca­tion on the is­sue.

In fact, Dr Paras­ram, in re­sponse to ques­tions from a re­porter, said there had been no con­cerns about the num­ber of deaths at the hos­pi­tal while the doc­tors were there.

What is clear, how­ev­er, is that these front­line med­ical pro­fes­sion­als are now be­ing por­trayed in a neg­a­tive light af­ter work­ing through­out the pan­dem­ic with no red flags raised about their work.

That is why Mr Thomas must be called to ac­count for his al­le­ga­tions and if he can­not do so, he should ei­ther be re­moved or step down.