RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

A dis­ci­pli­nary tri­bunal set up by the T&T Med­ical Board has sus­pend­ed Dr Avinash Sawh for one week, af­ter find­ing him guilty of “in­fa­mous and dis­grace­ful con­duct” over a race-re­lat­ed rant which was caught on cam­era.

The tri­bunal was led by TTMB chair­man Dr Neil Adri­an Singh and in­clud­ed Dr Pe­ter Bhag­gan, Dr Kr­ish­na Ram­soob­hag, Dr Lynette See­baran-Suite and le­gal ad­vi­sor John Heath.

In an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, TTMB coun­cil chair­man Dr Singh re­vealed that un­for­tu­nate­ly, no­body came for­ward to give ev­i­dence against Dr Sawh, who was ac­cused of mak­ing a racial rant against an em­ploy­ee in 2020.

The record­ings went vi­ral on so­cial me­dia and calls were made for the TTMB to re­voke Dr Sawh’s med­ical li­cence.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Dr Singh said the re­vo­ca­tion of Sawh’s li­cence could not be done as there was no ev­i­dence to im­pli­cate him, ex­cept for his own pub­lic apol­o­gy which tied him to the record­ings.

Dr Sawh was lat­er charged with “al­leged­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in a con­ver­sa­tion which was record­ed and put in the pub­lic do­main in which he made com­ments that amount­ed to in­fa­mous and dis­grace­ful con­duct.”

Giv­ing an overview of the pro­ceed­ings, Dr Singh said the tri­bunal tried to get the rel­e­vant par­ties to tes­ti­fy. He said let­ters were writ­ten to five com­plainants who wrote of­fi­cial let­ters to the TTMB re­quest­ing their pres­ence for ev­i­dence and cross-ex­am­i­na­tion, as dic­tat­ed by the rules of nat­ur­al jus­tice. How­ev­er, he said no­body even­tu­al­ly came for­ward to give ev­i­dence.

Among the of­fi­cial com­plainants were Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Reg­is­tered Nurs­es’ As­so­ci­a­tion, the African Stu­dent Union and a med­ical doc­tor.

The woman who al­leged­ly post­ed the record­ings of Dr Sawh’s al­leged racial rant al­so did not give ev­i­dence be­fore the tri­bunal, so the body was hard-pressed to ver­i­fy whether the record­ing was, in fact, Dr Sawh.

“As such, the record­ings were there­fore not part of the ev­i­dence viewed by the tri­bunal,” Dr Singh ex­plained.

He not­ed, how­ev­er, that a pub­lic apol­o­gy by Dr Sawh, car­ried on the CNC3 News af­ter the in­ci­dent, was ten­dered in­to ev­i­dence.

“It is the apol­o­gy on CNC3 News that con­nect­ed him (Dr Sawh) to the record­ings and con­vict­ed him,” Dr Singh ex­plained.

The tri­bunal con­clud­ed that the apol­o­gy con­tained in the video record­ing was suf­fi­cient proof to as­cribe the state­ments to Dr Sawh.

“Hav­ing re­gard to the fact that there was no ev­i­dence ten­dered to re­fute this con­clu­sion and hav­ing care­ful­ly con­sid­ered sub­mis­sions made by coun­sel for the re­spec­tive par­ties, the tri­bunal found Dr Sawh guilty of in­fa­mous and dis­grace­ful con­duct,” Dr Singh re­vealed.

While he ad­mit­ted the pub­lic may be in­censed over the le­nien­cy of the sus­pen­sion, Dr Singh said this was the best op­tion.

He al­so said that Dr Sawh’s “un­blem­ished record as a med­ical doc­tor for 19 years, as well as his sub­se­quent pub­lic apol­o­gy al­lowed the tri­bunal to im­pose the sanc­tion of sus­pen­sion in ac­cor­dance with Sec­tion 24 (2b) of the Med­ical Board Act.”

The sus­pen­sion be­gins on June 1.

Dr Singh al­so re­mind­ed all mem­bers of the Med­ical Board to be mind­ful of the Code of Ethics in the Prac­tice of Med­i­cine, not­ing that a doc­tor must al­ways main­tain the high­est stan­dards of pro­fes­sion­al con­duct. He not­ed that mis­con­duct of any kind has the po­ten­tial of bring­ing the pro­fes­sion in­to dis­re­pute.