Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Two days af­ter a moth­er re­port­ed­ly wait­ed for hours for an am­bu­lance that re­port­ed­ly nev­er ar­rived, af­ter giv­ing birth at an events cen­tre, Min­is­ter of Health Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe says he has re­quest­ed a full re­port on the mat­ter.

Po­lice said that the woman, who did not know that she was even preg­nant, went in­to labour while at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence, Ma­coya, on Sat­ur­day af­ter­noon.

The woman told staff that she was un­aware she was preg­nant, as she had gaps in her men­stru­al cy­cle in the past and did not think much of the ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties in her cy­cle.

The woman’s moth­er ar­rived at the lo­ca­tion and re­port­ed­ly called for an am­bu­lance, but one nev­er ar­rived.

She was even­tu­al­ly tak­en to the Mt Hope Women’s Hos­pi­tal, where the full-term ba­by boy was de­clared dead.

Po­lice said that doc­tors re­port­ed that an um­bil­i­cal cord was wrapped around the child’s neck, and he was al­so cov­ered in meco­ni­um (the first stool pro­duced by a ba­by), hav­ing been in a toi­let bowl for two hours.

When con­tact­ed for com­ment, Bo­doe lament­ed the in­ci­dent and ex­tend­ed his con­do­lences to the fam­i­ly.

He ac­knowl­edged that the ba­by was de­liv­ered un­der “very dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances,” but main­tained that the min­istry did not have all the facts on the mat­ter and de­clined to com­ment fur­ther.

“While the mat­ter is be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice, the min­istry has re­quest­ed a full re­port in­to the re­sponse time by the am­bu­lance ser­vices.”

Con­tact­ed for com­ment, CEO of Glob­al Med­ical Re­sponse of T&T (GM­RTT), Dr Paul An­der­son, said there had been a grad­ual in­crease in the de­mand for emer­gency re­spons­es be­tween 2022 to 2024.

“It’s in­creas­ing at a fair­ly mod­er­ate rate of about three to five per cent per an­num.

“The one area that im­me­di­ate­ly presents a great chal­lenge to us is de­lays in hand­ing over pa­tients at some of the pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions, es­pe­cial­ly at some of the larg­er gen­er­al hos­pi­tals’ ac­ci­dent and emer­gency (wards).

“Of­ten­times, am­bu­lances are on pro­tract­ed de­lays; there­fore, they can’t re­turn to ser­vice to re­spond to oth­er emer­gen­cies that may arise.”

When asked what sug­ges­tions he had for a more ef­fi­cient, re­li­able am­bu­lance ser­vice, An­der­son said he sub­mit­ted a re­port to Health Min­is­ter Bo­doe on the sta­tus of re­sponse times. He not­ed that re­sponse time per­for­mance re­quire­ments were in­clud­ed in the con­tracts of am­bu­lance ser­vice providers, which main­tained a cer­tain stan­dard of ser­vice.

He not­ed, how­ev­er, that these re­quire­ments of­ten var­ied de­pend­ing on the dis­tance to the emer­gency, which can take be­tween five to 25 min­utes.

An­der­son said he felt there were suf­fi­cient am­bu­lances to meet the re­quire­ments.

“We do have a re­quire­ment in the con­tract to have a fleet of about 50 am­bu­lances. We have added more, which brings us to a to­tal of 70, but this will trig­ger the de­com­mis­sion­ing of old­er ve­hi­cles that aren’t as re­li­able.”

Ef­forts to con­tact the rel­a­tives of the woman, who gave birth to the ba­by boy, were un­suc­cess­ful.