Wade Mark: Are you accusing 'burnt out' doctors of murder?

OPPOSITION senator Wade Mark bashed North Central Regional Health Authority (NCRHA) CEO Davlin Thomas for attributing the high covid19 daily death toll to four doctors who were recently reassigned out of the Couva Hospital and Multi-Training Facility.

This comes after Thomas in a release on Saturday said that since the rotation of the four, deaths at the Couva hospital have decreased by 60 per cent and increased discharges by 25 per cent, in the last eight days.

Mark at a UNC press conference on Sunday, said “What Davlin attempted to do in that release was to accuse the doctors, that he rotated on the excuse of them being burnt out, of murder.”

The doctors were reassigned on May 19. Eleven doctors have since called on the board to conduct an urgent independent and transparent investigation into the reassignment of these specialist doctors.

Both the TT Medical Association and the TT Regis­tered Nurses Association have also weighed in on reassignment describing the move as “demoralising.”

At the UNC’s press conference at the Office of the Opposition Leader on Charles Street, Port of Spain Mark charged, “We will be calling for a criminal investigation into the Prime Minister's comprehensive mismanagement of the covid19 pandemic, inclusive of delayed vaccines, ventilator shortages, ineffective covid19 treatment, including testing and weak protocols to manage some 8,000 patients who have been placed in isolation.”

He believes the reassigned doctors were purposefully targeted because someone doesn't like them, doesn't like what they did or what they said.

He accused the NCRHA head of failing to admit that the reduction in deaths and increase in discharges, over the past week, at the Couva facility was due to the expansion of the parallel health system to accommodate an increase in covid19 positive patients.

Mark went on to question the authenticity of Thomas’s claims and challenged him to bring evidence to support his statement that deaths at the Couva facility have decreased since the four doctors were reassigned.

“If he cannot do this then he must resign or be fired,” Mark said. Attempts to reach CEO Thomas for a comment after the UNC press conference were unsuccessful.