Rishard Khan 
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt 

 Praise is pour­ing in from Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh for staff at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal who dis­cov­ered and saved a ba­by girl af­ter she was aban­doned in a bin ear­li­er this week.  

"Let me ex­press my grat­i­tude to the staff of San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal who re­spond­ed to the cries of that in­fant and who are tak­ing care of that in­fant," he said.  

He said as far as he knows, it is not a fre­quent oc­cur­rence for peo­ple to aban­don ba­bies at hos­pi­tals.  

"To my knowl­edge, this may be one of the first or few oc­ca­sions that that has hap­pened in a hos­pi­tal set­ting. I know very of­ten...ba­bies are found in oth­er set­tings but as far as be­ing found in a hos­pi­tal set­ting, this is prob­a­bly the first one that I know of. So it doesn't seem to be a com­mon event, thank God and re­al­ly again, con­grat­u­la­tions to the staff at San Fer­nan­do Hos­pi­tal for ris­ing to the oc­ca­sion to take care of this pre­cious life," he said.  

On Mon­day a two-day-old ba­by girl was found dis­card­ed in a garbage bag at the hos­pi­tal. She was dis­cov­ered af­ter Emanuel Pierre went to the hos­pi­tal for a job in­ter­view when around 9 am, he no­ticed a garbage bag in a hall­way with the top twist­ed and heard nois­es in­side. He opened it and found the ba­by in­side with a note. He alert­ed nurs­es, who ex­am­ined the ba­by and took her for treat­ment. The note ap­peared to be from the ba­by’s moth­er, ex­plain­ing that she did not have the means to take care of the child.  

The Chil­dren's Au­thor­i­ty is ex­pect­ed to have vis­it­ed the ba­by on Wednes­day.