Bermuda Hospitals' Board discriminated against a black psychiatrist.

Ghanaian Dr. Isaac Ewusi-Mensah, who specialises in treatment of the mentally handicapped, filed the complaint last month after he was told that his contract at St. Brendan's would not be renewed.

Executive director of the Board, Mr. Hume Martin, said then that the decision was due to "financial circumstances faced by the Board''.

Dr. Ewusi-Mensah, who is the longest serving consultant psychiatrist at the hospital, was the only one of five staff psychiatrists not to win renewal of his contract, which expires in April.

"The decision will reduce the Board's complement of psychiatrists from five to four -- the same level employed in early 1989,'' Mr. Martin stated.

"Responsibility for the mentally handicapped services will be assigned to the remaining four psychiatrists. The Board is completely confident that it can continue to maintain the high standards of service for the mentally handicapped population with one fewer psychiatrist.'' But Dr. Ewusi-Mensah wrote a memorandum to the Board challenging the decision to eliminate the position.

Calling the decision "gravely flawed and short sighted'', Dr. Ewusi-Mensah noted Bermuda had one of the highest rates of mentally handicapped persons per population -- one in 200.

"Bermuda, an isolated Island, has a captive population,'' he wrote. "There is inevitably a genetic pool of citizens who carry the recessive gene that causes mental handicap. The gene only becomes expressed clinically through interbreeding, that is consanguineous marriages.

"There is a need for genetic counselling service in Bermuda to offer advice for prevention, to provide education and support, particularly for new couples, and to interpret tests.'' Dr. Ewusi-Mensah said he and a Bermudian geneticist started such a service more than three years ago.

But he said unless such a service is "fully established and ongoing, there will continue to be a disproportionately high incidence of mental handicap in the community, making increasing demands on families, hospitals and the nation for resources for their care''.

Dr. Ewusi-Mensah also noted about a third of the beds in St. Brendan's were occupied by people with mental handicaps.

He said the care of such people required "a dedicated multidisciplinary team of specially trained professionals who have experience in providing the care''.

But Dr. Ewusi-Mensah claimed, in his complaint to the Commission, that none of the other psychiatrists had "the experience, qualifications or disposition to effectively care for the mentally handicapped''.