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Thursday, July 24, 2025

Free private health care to benefit 6,000

by

20140530

Cab­i­net yes­ter­day ap­proved a $10 mil­lion health project to ben­e­fit more than 6,000 cit­i­zens ini­tial­ly.Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan told the week­ly post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, St Clair, about the ini­tia­tive, the Ex­ter­nal Pa­tients Pro­gramme (EPP), which is in­tend­ed to en­sure that peo­ple who have to wait pro­longed pe­ri­ods for ap­point­ments will be al­lowed to have the surgery or oth­er pro­ce­dures at pri­vate med­ical in­sti­tu­tions across the coun­try.Among those to ben­e­fit ini­tial­ly are pa­tients await­ing cataract surgery, CT and MRI scans and re­ports, pathol­o­gy spec­i­men re­ports, hip and knee surgery. The list will be in­creased to in­clude prostate surgery and oth­er op­er­a­tions.

He said peo­ple who want­ed those op­er­a­tions done in the pub­lic health sys­tem have an ex­treme­ly long wait­ing time.A con­di­tion for ac­cess­ing the pro­gramme, Khan said was that the pa­tient must have been wait­ing in the pub­lic health sys­tem for more than three months.The pa­tient will have to fill out a form to the pro­gramme ad­min­is­tra­tor at the Min­istry of Health and will be giv­en a vouch­er to go to an in­sti­tu­tion for the re­quired ser­vice.The cho­sen sup­pli­er will re­deem the vouch­er. Khan said ne­go­ti­a­tions were still tak­ing place with those sup­pli­ers.Moves to have un­used ca­pac­i­ty at pub­lic hos­pi­tals were frus­trat­ed, he com­plained, be­cause "those who were sup­posed to do the nor­mal work were not do­ing it and mak­ing sure that there was a back­log. So we are part­ner­ing with the pri­vate sec­tor."

Khan said den­tal ser­vices were al­so ex­pect­ed to be added to the EPP short­ly.He said the sys­tem would re­duce the pos­si­bil­i­ty of fraud and au­dit pro­grammes would be in place at the re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties.Khan said the num­ber of cit­i­zens vis­it­ing pub­lic hos­pi­tals had been in­creas­ing over the past years, ow­ing to the in­creas­ing in­take of salty, fat­ty, sug­ary and processed foods by cit­i­zens, re­sult­ing in an in­crease in car­diac, kid­ney and reti­nal pa­tients and a high lev­el of obe­si­ty.T&T was the fifth most obese coun­try in the world, he said, mak­ing the dis­ease an epi­dem­ic.He said pri­vate health in­sti­tu­tions have been asked to sub­mit pro­pos­als to the Gov­ern­ment to make this ini­tia­tive suc­cess­ful and it will be an on­go­ing ex­er­cise and not just for the short-term.


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