Belize Medical Council is Solely Responsible for Vetting and Licensing

Ramon Figueroa

As we told you Tuesday night, all it took to get information on John Robert Hall was a visit to Google. His arrest in North Carolina for injecting semen into the mouths of seven of his female patients popped up immediately. So how did that get past the Belize Medical Council?

Dr. Ramon Figueroa, C.E.O., Ministry of Health

“I can only go by face value, and one may want to assume that maybe there was not due diligence, but I can’t speak to that. I can’t say that was in fact what happened. It’s something as I said that the Medical council will have to look at in a responsible manner and see what went wrong…why was it that we missed something like this that could probably have been obtained from looking up this gentleman on the Internet. I’m sure that we can find better ways of conducting due diligence to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. That’s as much as I can say. I can’t speak to what happened actually and what went on in terms of the provision of the license to that gentleman. I can’t speak to that. There’s a lot of things that need to be fixed in our health system…licensing and accreditation of facilities – we can start speaking about facilities which don’t meet the basic standards to provide services. There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed. And I will reiterate this is one of those we’ll want to look at and see what measures we will want to put in place to ensure that it does not happen, and use this as a learning experience so that we can improve this particular mechanism.”

Hall is currently out on three thousand dollars bail for a charge of false representation and has had to surrender his travel documents. He is to reappear in Court on February thirteenth. As we have done since Tuesday when the story broke, we tried to reach Chairman of the Belize Medical Council George Gough for comment. We were told that he left the country today.