Pe­ter Christo­pher

Se­nior Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

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 po­lit­i­cal meet­ing at the Ex­o­dus pa­n­yard in Tu­na­puna last night.

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.

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.

"Our world has changed. To­day's world re­quires more ac­cess to the in­ter­net. We are con­cerned that our young cit­i­zens in school and our stu­dents need ac­cess to the in­ter­net to nav­i­gate this world. We are con­cerned that some may not be able to af­ford it and are go­ing to be left be­hind. So to­day, I have con­sult­ed with our Min­is­ter of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion, and we will be com­mu­ni­cat­ing with both TSTT and Dig­i­cel to im­me­di­ate­ly re­duce the cost of ac­cess to da­ta for young cit­i­zens and to give them more ac­cess to da­ta," he said

The meet­ing was at­tend­ed by for­mer prime min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, po­lit­i­cal leader of the par­ty, and for­mer UNC mem­ber Lar­ry Lal­la, who made his de­but as a speak­er on the PNM stage last night.