This study measured drivers’ understanding of safety belt issues. While most Trinidad motorists are comfortable wearing safety belts and understand their purpose, fewer understand their relationship with airbags. Education was preferred for increasing belt usage and should be used to attain long-term goals.

In a serological study on 123 patients with pneumonia, 39 (31.7%) and 2 (1.6%) were positive for L pneumophila IgM/G/A and IgM only respectively. Seroprevalence was not significantly (p > 0.05; χ2) affected by hospitals, gender, ethnicity and co-morbidities.

Regional disaggregating of national statistics regarding homicide and suicide reveal geographic and ethnic variation of these mortality related behaviours. This suggests that victims of homicide and suicide have a different set of risk factors that are in part explained by where they are located geographically and prevention and analysis can only be addressed if the regional variations are understood and explained.

The increasing importance of patient-centred healthcare systems coupled with the ease of availability of health research findings necessitate continuous analyses of reported health information for credibility, accuracy, relevancy and coverage.

Health research published by the newsprint media might influence the public’s perception of the aetiologies of important diseases. Consequently, stakeholders must analyze the quality of such articles for scientific accuracy.

The use of the oral contraceptive pill (OCP) to batch 74 women’s cycles in an intermittent in vitro fertilization (IVF) programme was compared with 121 cycles without the OCP. The method was effective, simple and cheap and is therefore recommended for other small IVF centres which perform intermittent, batched treatment.

Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is compared to the Open and Minilap approaches in a cost minimization analysis for public hospitals in Trinidad and Tobago. There is a reduced recovery period for patients and this translates into savings to other sectors of the economy.

In-depth interviews were analyzed to determine the critical incidents that contribute to the initiation of substance use among women. The results fell into eight themes, including factors intrinsic to the woman and substance abuse as a coping mechanism.

Between September 1998 and February 2003, 204 children underwent cardiac surgery in Trinidad and Tobago for various congenital cardiac lesions. Mortality rate was less than one per cent.