Health Minister Therese Baptiste-Cornelis appears to be taking an unduly legalistic position on the release of the report into Chrystal Boodoo-Ramsoomair's death. By claiming that the Medical Professionals Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MPATT) need not see the report, the Health Minister is sending an unhelpfully uncooperative message to MPATT, whose members have an obvious interest in the contents.

Given that some content of the report has been published in the media, what useful point can the Minister make by hanging tough and withholding material already made public? Ms Baptiste-Cornelis has claimed that MPATT need not see the report, which examines the circumstances surrounding Boodoo-Ramsoomair's death after she gave birth to a baby girl by Caesarean section, because it has nothing to do with disciplinary action against the doctors. "It is to say, this is what happened, this is what we found, this is the conclusion, and these are the recommendations to ensure that it does not happen again," she told the media last Sunday.

Apart from flying in the face of the transparency promised by the People's Partnership, however, this assertion makes little sense. As the representative body for the doctors, surely MPATT is the organisation best placed to disseminate the report's findings to health personnel and help ensure implementation of the recommendations. Even if MPATT disagrees with the report's findings, its critique would be useful for the Health Ministry itself, either in terms of alternative solutions or, at the very least, in providing insight for health officials to the association's perspectives and agenda.

The Minister also appeared to contradict herself by saying that she was withholding the report based on legal advice. But if there are no plans by the Ministry to take legal action, and given that the report is already in the public domain, what is the legal issue? The report, Ms Baptiste-Cornelis said, is in the hands of Attorney General Anand Ramlogan, who will decide if further steps need to be taken, which would imply some sort of legal recourse. Is the Health Ministry then trying to give itself an advantage should matters reach this pass?

MPATT head Dr Shehenaz Mohammed has already said that, if the Ministry does not provide MPATT with a copy of the report, the group will take its own legal action to get it. That entails two negative outcomes for the Government: first, by further undermining relations between the Health Ministry and the doctors; next, putting the Health Minister in a poor light if the courts were to decide in MPATT's favour.

By adopting this unreasonable stance, Ms Baptiste-Cornelis is only adding friction to an already tense relationship. Should she not, instead, err on the side of upholding and extending the promised transparency?