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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Amputees to get help next year

by

20131221

Am­putees who can­not af­ford pros­thet­ics limbs can ex­pect some re­lief in the new year. This was the as­sur­ance giv­en by Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment Dr Glenn Ra­mad­hars­ingh. Speak­ing to re­porters at a ham­per dis­tri­b­u­tion ex­er­cise at Preysal Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre on Thurs­day night, Ra­mad­hars­ingh said he planned to roll out his or­thotics and pros­thet­ics pro­gramme by mid-Jan­u­ary 2014. "Peo­ple who have been suf­fer­ing be­cause of am­pu­ta­tions will fi­nal­ly be able to walk on their own," he said.

He added, "We will be launch­ing a cam­paign to de­ter­mine what help can be giv­en for the deaf and blind and we will al­so in­ten­si­fy our ef­forts with the so­cial­ly dis­abled am­bas­sadors to help the dif­fer­ent­ly abled," Ra­mad­hars­ingh said. He said an im­me­di­ate ac­tion plan to deal with street dwellers will al­so be ramped up. "We will em­bark on two months of ag­gres­sive ac­tion be­tween Jan­u­ary to March," Ra­mad­hars­ingh said.

He added that the min­istry will part­ner with in­ter­na­tion­al ex­perts based lo­cal­ly to build pros­thet­ic limbs for the am­putees. Based on min­istry sta­tis­tics, T&T has about 140,000 di­a­bet­ics. Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400 peo­ple lose limbs an­nu­al­ly, ac­cord­ing to Min­istry of Health es­ti­mates. Grants, the min­is­ter said, would be fund­ed up to about $40,000 per per­son. In ex­cep­tion­al cas­es it would not ex­ceed $100,000, the min­is­ter added.

He said that the min­istry will de­ter­mine the el­i­gi­bil­i­ty of ap­pli­cants and a com­mit­tee of min­istry of­fi­cials will sur­vey ap­pli­ca­tions. He said pros­thet­ics have been sourced at a rea­son­able cost of US$2,000 to $5,000. The nor­mal cost av­er­ages about US$20,000 to $30,000. Ra­mad­hars­ingh al­so boast­ed that pover­ty is slow­ly be­ing re­duced.

"House­hold and bud­getary sur­veys done by Min­istry of Plan­ning shows pover­ty has fall­en from 24.5 per cent to 17.4 per cent. We are in­ten­si­fy­ing our ef­forts in that re­gard to em­pow­er peo­ple," Ra­mad­hars­ingh said. He not­ed that so­cial men­tors will al­so be hired to pro­vide sup­port to those who are phys­i­cal­ly chal­lenged in the new year.


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