A months-long legal battle over public transparency has reached a turning point, as top legal advocate Anand Ramlogan is pushing Trinidad and Tobago’s North West Regional Health Authority (NWRHA) to put an end to court proceedings and negotiate fair settlements with the families of seven newborns who died in a bacterial outbreak at Port of Spain General Hospital in April 2024.
Ramlogan made his appeal fresh off a landmark High Court decision this past Thursday, which ruled in favor of his client Shanya Raymond-Adams and ordered the NWRHA to release its internal investigative report into the preventable infant deaths. In a formal public statement, the senior counsel accused the public health authority of misappropriating taxpayer dollars to fend off the grieving families’ legal claims, rather than offering clear answers about what caused the outbreak and just compensation for their devastating loss.
“No amount of financial settlement can bring back the seven infants that these families lost, or heal the profound grief that their mothers have carried every day since,” Ramlogan said in his statement. “That said, fair settlement offers would provide meaningful support to these families and spare them the additional pain and stress of dragging this process through the courts for months or years to come.”
Ramlogan led the successful legal challenge against the NWRHA on behalf of Raymond-Adams, who was one of the mothers denied access to the internal authority’s internal probe findings after the outbreak. He condemned the authority’s months-long refusal to release the report as a blatant injustice, noting that grieving parents had been forced to sue the very public institution that was trusted to care for their infants just to learn how their children died.
He pointedly criticized the NWRHA for its treatment of the families, highlighting that more than two years after the outbreak, the affected mothers have not received any compensation while the authority has drained public funds on legal fees to delay the case. Ramlogan is also calling for formal accountability for the officials who made the decision to withhold the report, arguing that covering up findings from an investigation into preventable infant deaths can never be justified under any circumstances.
The case lays bare a stark contradiction between the NWRHA’s public commitments to transparency and its behind-the-scenes efforts to block disclosure, Ramlogan emphasized. Then-NWRHA chief executive officer Anthony Blake publicly promised just weeks after the 2024 outbreak that the full investigation findings would be released to the public. But just months later, Blake submitted a sworn court affidavit opposing Raymond-Adams’ request for the documents, backing the authority’s claim that the report was protected from disclosure under legal professional privilege.
In his ruling, Justice Robin Mohammed rejected that argument, finding that the NWRHA failed to produce sufficient documentation to prove the report qualified for privilege protection. Ramlogan called the authority’s broken promise of transparency blatant hypocrisy, noting that the grieving mothers reasonably trusted the NWRHA’s public commitment to openness as they navigated the loss of their children.
The court ruling, Ramlogan said, raises urgent new questions about why the NWRHA chose to wage a prolonged and expensive court battle instead of honoring its original promise to release the findings. He is now urging the authority to move quickly to comply with the court’s disclosure order, redacting only necessary confidential personal information before making the full report public.
“These families, and the entire country, have a right to know what the investigation uncovered: what led to these babies’ deaths, where systemic failures occurred, and what changes have already been implemented to stop this tragedy from happening again,” Ramlogan said. “These mothers have carried their grief and fought for answers for years. They have waited long enough, and the truth about these deaths can no longer be hidden.”