It would be impractical to provide on-site medical specialist capacity to all of the Judiciary’s 25 locations, it said in a release on Sunday.

The Judiciary also insisted it was able to deal with medical emergencies at any of its court buildings.

In a statement sent close to midnight on Sunday, the Judiciary took issue with suggestions that there were no emergency medical response procedures in place when attorney Neil Byam collapsed on Friday and later died in the courtroom.

Byam, 61, a retired deputy Solicitor General, was addressing the panel of judges in the Appeal Court, Hall of Justice, Port of Spain when he collapsed and had to be aided by the judges and attorneys present.

A Judiciary employee tried to resuscitate the unconscious Byam by following instructions given by a doctor who was contacted via video conferencing. Emergency responders came 20 minutes later.

Addressing what had happened later that day, Justice Prakash Moosai, one of the three judges on the panel before whom Byam was making submissions, said a review or overhaul of the Judiciary’s emergency response protocols was needed.

“The response system ought to be a bit quicker in my view,” he said.

However, the Judiciary’s release said “nothing could be further from the truth” than to suggest there were no emergency medical response procedures in place.

It mentioned queries by Newsday for confirmation that an incident had taken place at the Court of Appeal, but said “not having had confirmation of his passing” at the time and in consideration to Byam’s family, it “merely confirmed  that there had been a medical incident.”

It then advised of the “accurate medical response procedure” at the Judiciary.

According to the release, all judges and staff have the number for its medical response team (MRT), including its security officers assigned throughout the buildings.

It said on Friday, Justice Gillian Lucky, who was also presiding over the appeal with Moosai and Justice Allan Mendonca, called the MRT number and got an immediate response.

The Judiciary's standard operating procedure is for one of its trained and certified first responders to immediately go to the person’s aid.

"In each of our 25 court locations, all of the senior security personnel (our men in black) and other court security officers, as well as several other members of staff, are trained and certified to act on these occasions. On this occasion, a trained court security officer arrived within two minutes and turned the attorney on his side and began compression subsequently.

“As a doctor had been called by someone in the courtroom and was on video, he (the security officer) did not act independently as he would do otherwise but followed instructions of the doctor until the ambulance service which was called by our MRT arrived within 18 minutes.”

The Judiciary said its MRT on-call doctors were not called immediately as its procedures require, since “a doctor was already guiding our first responder.”

“Our first responder was about to begin mouth-to-mouth