Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young has promised to es­tab­lish vir­tu­al doc­tor ses­sions for the el­der­ly should the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment be re-elect­ed in the April 28 polls. The Prime Min­is­ter al­so plans to of­fer cheap­er da­ta plans for young peo­ple of T&T.

He made the promis­es dur­ing a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment po­lit­i­cal meet­ing at the Ex­o­dus pa­n­yard in Tu­na­puna on Sat­ur­day.

Young said this ap­proach was far more re­spon­si­ble and po­ten­tial­ly cost-ef­fec­tive than the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress’ plan to send doc­tors phys­i­cal­ly to the homes of el­der­ly peo­ple. “Af­ter con­sult­ing with Min­is­ter (Ter­rence) Deyals­ingh to­day and ask­ing him to get more in­for­ma­tion, the next PNM Gov­ern­ment, hav­ing con­sid­er­a­tion and con­sid­er­ing in par­tic­u­lar our se­nior cit­i­zens, we are go­ing to ex­pand the avail­abil­i­ty and use of vir­tu­al doc­tor con­sul­ta­tions for se­nior cit­i­zens who want to use it so they don’t have to sit down for hours wait­ing in a health­care cen­tre,” said Young.

“That is how you do it re­spon­si­bly. You don’t say you’re go­ing to send doc­tors to every­body’s house; the cost of that, if one doc­tor can go to three dif­fer­ent hous­es in a day.”

He said that this would align with plans he dis­cussed with the Health Min­is­ter for im­ple­ment­ing dig­i­tal health records, which he be­lieves would en­hance ef­fi­cien­cy in the health sec­tor.

When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, for­mer health min­is­ter, Dr Fuad Khan felt both plans were fea­si­ble, but he be­lieved both cam­paign promis­es need­ed to be prop­er­ly fleshed out to be ef­fec­tive. “I am a firm be­liev­er in telemed­i­cine and in­ter­net-based as­sess­ments. So when you look at vir­tu­al meet­ings that is telemed­i­cine. How­ev­er, to do telemed­i­cine prop­er­ly, a con­sul­ta­tion is not enough. You have to have meth­ods of deal­ing with blood pres­sure, oph­thal­mo­log­i­cal things, and al­so ECGs.”

He added, “You can­not ex­am­ine them in a house vir­tu­al. So yes, they’re mak­ing a lot of cam­paign promis­es, but the prac­ti­cal­i­ty of it leaves a lot to be de­sired. What they can do is have ar­eas close to home, such as in malls, or ar­eas of gov­ern­ment ser­vice, etc, where they could put up telemed­i­cine ar­eas that the el­der­ly per­son could go to that area and see a vir­tu­al doc­tor, while a nurse or a prac­ti­cal nurs­ing as­sis­tant takes the blood pres­sure, up­loads it to­geth­er with the ECG, if any­thing else.”

On the oth­er hand, the med­ical doc­tor felt the UNC plan could pro­vide work for sev­er­al doc­tors who strug­gled to find jobs af­ter grad­u­at­ing.

“We have a lot of doc­tors who have grad­u­at­ed and don’t have jobs. They can be used to go to dif­fer­ent homes and do ser­vice, based on a per­son pay­ment rather than a month­ly pay­ment. So both sys­tems can work, but they need to be de­vel­oped prop­er­ly,” said Khan.

The Prime Min­is­ter al­so said he had plans to talk with telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vice providers to of­fer cheap­er da­ta plans for young peo­ple in the coun­try.

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion ex­pert Kwe­si Prescod said he hoped the con­ver­sa­tion would al­low for telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion providers to dis­cuss poli­cies which have ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed rev­enue for these com­pa­nies.

“I can on­ly hope that in that con­ver­sa­tion, he’s will­ing to hear what has been said by op­er­a­tors for quite some time to the Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion, but has been ig­nored. That would in­clude that the rea­son why da­ta plans have been in­creas­ing of late more reg­u­lar­ly than be­fore is be­cause the di­ver­si­fied rev­enue chan­nels of op­er­a­tors have been con­strained by a num­ber of pol­i­cy po­si­tions,” said Prescod, who al­so ques­tioned what met­ric would be used to de­ter­mine who would qual­i­fy for a cheap­er da­ta plan as a young per­son.