An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

The five Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties (RHAs) have re­ceived over US$10 mil­lion in new state-of-the-art di­ag­nos­tic imag­ing equip­ment.

This was do­nat­ed by Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors Lim­it­ed (PPG­PL) and re­ceived by the North­west Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NWRHA) at the St James Med­ical Com­plex at a hand­ing-over cer­e­mo­ny yes­ter­day.

Act­ing Prime Min­is­ter and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said cor­po­rate Trinidad has a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to as­sist, and the en­er­gy sec­tor has been do­ing its part.

“It is al­ways im­por­tant that we look af­ter our broth­ers and sis­ters. And as a cit­i­zen, that is some­thing that both­ers me dai­ly: that those who have more in our cor­po­rate so­ci­ety try and help those who have less. Be­cause the Gov­ern­ment can­not car­ry it alone.

“So when I see things like this even though it is a state en­ter­prise, hope­ful­ly, it will open up that con­fi­dence and that op­por­tu­ni­ty and that de­sire in oth­er pri­vate sec­tor com­pa­nies to find these types of part­ner­ships, in par­tic­u­lar with the health sec­tor and with our ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor, to look af­ter all of the cit­i­zens,” Young em­pha­sised.

Please main­tain the equip­ment–Young

He plead­ed with those in charge of the RHAs and cen­tres to prop­er­ly main­tain the equip­ment.

“Very of­ten it could be one small part that goes down and the length of time it takes to go through a pro­cure­ment process to get it back work­ing ... Please, I plead with you all, and I plead with the ad­min­is­tra­tion, the Min­istry of Health, the NWRHA, and all of the RHAs not to let that hap­pen. We have to main­tain these things be­cause there are fu­ture gen­er­a­tions that need them,” he added.

Al­so speak­ing was PPG­PL pres­i­dent Do­minic Ram­per­sad, who said peo­ple no longer have to mort­gage their home and use in­sur­ance poli­cies to get ac­cess to this equip­ment; it is avail­able.

“When we first start­ed, it was in­tend­ed to go to the Na­tion­al On­col­o­gy Cen­tre. And then there was a change of gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy, which ini­tial­ly we com­plete­ly sup­port­ed be­cause not every­thing has to be cen­tralised. You have to make it easy to ac­cess. So I would say to the Min­istry of Health to say thank you for en­sur­ing that this equip­ment is now avail­able at all of the re­gion­al health cen­tres,” Ram­per­sad added.