Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says T&T’s fer­til­i­ty rate has pro­gres­sive­ly de­clined be­tween 2015 to 2024.

Deyals­ingh quot­ed the fig­ures to re­porters af­ter vis­it­ing new moth­ers at Mt Hope Ma­ter­ni­ty Ward on Christ­mas morn­ing.

Deyals­ingh met and con­grat­u­lat­ed Am­ri­ta Gob­in who gave birth to her son Lu­cas at 1.13 am yes­ter­day morn­ing.

While at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, first time moth­er Tin­niel Mon­segue gave birth to her son Lael just af­ter 3 am.

Ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion from the THA, there were no Christ­mas ba­bies in To­ba­go.

While hap­py about the new ar­rivals, the Health Min­is­ter ad­dressed the coun­try’s fer­til­i­ty rate.

The fer­til­i­ty rate is a func­tion of the num­ber of live births and is an es­ti­mate of the num­ber of chil­dren a co­hort of 1,000 women be­tween the ages of 15 to 49 would bear.

It is es­ti­mat­ed that with­in this age brack­et, a woman would give birth to two chil­dren with a fer­til­i­ty rate of 2.1.

Ac­cord­ing to the da­ta the min­is­ter pro­vid­ed, the num­ber of live births in 2015 was 18,261, which trans­lates to a fer­til­i­ty rate of 1.8 for that year.

The fig­ure dipped sig­nif­i­cant­ly in 2023 with 12,768 which re­flects a fer­til­i­ty rate of 1.2.

Be­tween Jan­u­ary to No­vem­ber 2024, the num­ber of live births was 9,794 which re­flects a fer­til­i­ty rate of 0.9.

Deyals­ingh fur­ther ex­plained that for a coun­try to keep re­new­ing its pop­u­la­tion, a woman should have 2.1 chil­dren over her re­pro­duc­tive years.

How­ev­er, Deyals­ingh, main­tained that he would make no in­fer­ence on what con­tributed to the de­clin­ing fig­ures or what should be done in re­sponse.

“I’m just shar­ing these sta­tis­tics with you and hope­ful­ly it will spark some na­tion­al dis­cus­sion.

“Please do not ask me what the so­lu­tion is, I am not here to give you so­lu­tions, I am just pre­sent­ing da­ta. Facts.”

Be­tween April 2 to April 9, at least sev­en ba­bies died at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal’s Neona­tal In­ten­sive Care Unit (NICU).

Of­fi­cials from the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO), vis­it­ed T&T in late April and com­piled a re­port con­sist­ing of rec­om­men­da­tions on how to im­prove the state of op­er­a­tions at the hos­pi­tal.

This re­port was sub­mit­ted to the Min­istry of Health.

Asked about the im­ple­men­ta­tion of rec­om­men­da­tions, Deyals­ingh said sev­er­al rec­om­men­da­tions were al­ready im­ple­ment­ed and de­clined to di­vulge fur­ther de­tails, not­ing that le­gal pro­ceed­ings on the mat­ter were un­der­way.

CEO of the North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) Davlin Thomas not­ed that post-na­tal care was al­so a top pri­or­i­ty un­der his ju­ris­dic­tion as home vis­its for moth­ers who had prob­lem­at­ic de­liv­er­ies were al­so a prac­tice.

“We have some­thing called our post-na­tal health unit, so for the ba­bies or par­ents who had prob­lem­at­ic births we ac­tu­al­ly send a unit to their homes for the first month or so to guide them through to nor­mal­cy.”