In April, Dr Sherrise Sandy, MBBS (UWI), FRCPath (UK), sat one of medicine’s most demanding professional examinations, becoming the first candidate from Trinidad and Tobago to complete the Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists, the FRCPath, as an external candidate, with the entirety of her training completed at Port-of-Spain General Hospital.
The FRCPath credential is the highest level of professional recognition within the Royal College of Pathologists, a distinction that places Sandy among an elite group of specialists worldwide. It is, undoubtedly, the highlight of her career thus far. After many years of independent study, professional experience, and strong mentorship, she is a leading pathologist, a career path she didn’t initially choose but grew into.
During her formative years, Sandy grew up in San Juan and attended primary school at Sacred Heart Girls’ RC before going on to St Joseph’s Convent, Port-of-Spain. It was there, under the guidance of then-principal Elizabeth Crouch, that the seeds of her career were planted.
“I always loved math,” Sandy recalls, “and math pointed naturally towards accounting or business.” However, Mrs Crouch saw something else in her: a well-roundedness and a brilliance that seemed well-suited to the sciences.
For Sandy, getting into the sciences was not a huge deviation as a student who liked every aspect of school. By Form 5 and 6, she was fully immersed in the sciences, and medicine became the logical next step.
The pull toward medicine, though, was also personal. Sandy remembers watching her mother go to the doctor and wanting, even then, to be the one providing that care. That instinct, to take care of her mother, expanded into a broader desire to care for people generally.
It carried her into the MBBS programme at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. In medical school, she developed a strong affinity for surgery and set her sights on general surgery once her studies were complete.
But where a young doctor ends up often has less to do with preference than with where the system needs them. Port-of-Spain General Hospital is a service hospital rather than a teaching hospital, thus doctors are placed where the need is, not necessarily where the doctor envisions themselves.
When the time came to apply for a position, the vacancies open to her were pathology and neonatal intensive care, neither of which she had considered previously. She chose pathology, reasoning that “they are closely knit specialties, so I thought if I started there it would be an easy transition to general surgery once vacancies arose.”
General surgery, however, was not what was written in Sandy’s cards. Once she began working in pathology on a daily basis, she found a field far richer than the brief exposure medical school had given her.
“Pathologists are the doctors’ doctors,” she explains. “Pathology is the study of the nature of diseases from fluids, tissues and organs taken from the body.”
It is the specialty that clinicians rely on when a biopsy or surgical specimen needs a diagnosis. The field, she says, is foundational to cancer care in particular: treatment cannot begin until pathology delivers a histological diagnosis, confirming not just whether a growth is cancerous but its type, its aggressiveness, and how far it has spread.
Pathologists guide oncologists on which treatments are likely to work, making them essential partners across the entire patient care arc from diagnosis to treatment. It’s a role that has earned pathologists their apt nickname as the doctor’s doctor.
The specialty’s other, more well-known side is the autopsy. Sandy says medical training sensitises doctors to this work in a way that makes it less daunting than outsiders often assume. However, she is quick to note that not everyone is suited to it, which is precisely why medicine offers so many different paths.
For her, performing an autopsy is a task like any other: the deceased is still a patient, and she has a job to perform. The emotional weight does not come during, but afterward, in the room with the family, explaining what was determined.
It’s there that she says she feels most human in her work.
“I empathise with families,” she says. “I take time to explain, I go slowly.”
Those conversations and human exchanges being part of the job are part of what makes Sandy a good fit, as a social being and compassionate person.
Much of what drives Sandy is a desire to close the awareness gap around her chosen field. Even medical students, she points out, pass through their training with only a surface understanding of what pathology entails, and rarely consider it a viable option when choosing a specialty.
She has become a vocal advocate for the importance of mentoring younger colleagues, in part because she did not have that guidance when she started out. Her first mentor at Port-of-Spain General Hospital was Dr Shaheeba Barrow, who sparked her interest in the field and helped lay its foundations.
Later, Dr Mickhaiel Barrow, a consultant who guided her toward the UK examination pathway, and Dr Melanie Johncilla were instrumental in sharpening her training and preparing her for the exams that would help her career.
“That was the first time I had mentors to guide and coach me,” she says, “and I want to do that for others.”
The path to fellowship was not straightforward. At the time Sandy was ready to pursue advanced training, there was no local pathology residency programme, meaning doctors typically had to leave for a five-year residency in the US or UK.
Reluctant to go too far away, Sandy applied instead to the Doctor of Medicine programme in pathology in Jamaica. As a non-Jamaican national, she needed sponsorship from a local government ministry, sponsorship that, despite a public call for pathologists at the time, never materialised.
She deferred her spot once, then had to defer it again the following year.
The turning point came in 2018, with the arrival of a new UK-trained consultant at the hospital who opened the door to sitting the Royal College of Pathologists’ external examinations.
What followed was a gruelling, largely self-directed course of study. The FRCPath exam combines practical, written, and oral components designed to test whether a candidate can practise pathology independently at consultant level.
What made it even more challenging for Sandy is that it draws heavily on techniques, principles, and guidelines standard in the UK that are simply not commonplace in resource-limited settings.
“In T&T we are resource deficient,” Sandy says plainly. “Many techniques and principles commonplace in the UK and US we don’t use or see, so we know them only in theory.”
She built her own curriculum from virtual courses, often self-funded, working to keep pace with peers training inside formal residency structures abroad.
“Had I known this is what I had to do, I would have done it differently,” she reflects — though she did it anyway, relying on her own discipline, course material, and the sustained faith of her mentors, who she says were relentless in pushing her toward the finish line.
That persistence paid off in April when Sandy passed the final stage of the FRCPath examinations, becoming the first candidate from Trinidad and Tobago to earn the credential as an external candidate while training entirely at Port-of-Spain General Hospital.
This professional accolade carries global weight as a marker of specialist status, a credential that will only strengthen her hand in the mentoring work she hopes to do.
She feels encouraged, however, that the region has begun catching up institutionally: a Doctor of Medicine programme in pathology was launched locally in 2021, giving the next generation of young doctors an option she did not have.
Having moved through the ranks in professional medicine, from a house officer to now a senior registrar in pathology, Sandy has a wealth of experience to share.
For anyone eyeing pathology as a career, her advice is practical and straightforward. Spending time in a pathology department before committing, she urges, as an observership will tell you quickly whether you can handle the daily exposure the work demands.
She also cautions against long-term dithering. Medicine moves fast, residency windows don’t stay open forever, and the hours spent in a hospital have a way of swallowing time before a career specialty decision even gets made.
And whatever specialty someone chooses, she says, finding a mentor in the field is crucial, someone to guide you and bounce ideas off of, the way Drs Barrow and Johncilla did for her.
Outside the hospital, Sandy keeps life as exciting as she continues to be the well-rounded person she has been throughout her life. She is an enthusiastic Latin dancer, moonlights occasionally as a hostess for events, and continues to be someone whose interests are incredibly broad — from hiking and swimming in earlier years to a continued, active commitment to fitness today.
It’s a reminder that beyond the qualifications and professionally rigorous accolades is someone who built a life alongside a career. Guided at every turn — fittingly, for someone who now hopes to guide others — by strong mentors, many of them women, who believed firmly in her all the way before the credentials caught up.
