The disclosure that there is a shortage of ambulances available to service those who may fall ill in emergency circumstances is not very comforting because by its very nature a call for the ambulance is a call that more often than not cannot wait.
It is doubly disturbing to hear, too, that only three of the vehicles are available and that six of the complement are in the workshops and that of those three in service one cannot be used when it rains because there is a problem with the mechanical wipers, which have to be imported. We are also told that three new ambulances have been ordered and are due in the island by August.
It is shocking, to say the least, that this situation has been allowed to develop to the point where private ambulances are being used at the taxpayers’ expense simply because predictable events have occurred. We say predictable because vehicles require repair in the normal course of events and with proper planning it ought not to have been the case that as many as six of the nine ambulances were in the workshop at the same time.
It is also nothing short of scandalous that something as important as wipers cannot be repaired in short time. The service is so critical that it may be regarded as a sort of essential service and contingency plans must have been possible to avoid this situation where the absence of working wipers renders a seventh vehicle functionally useless when it rains.
It would be useful to know how the private ambulance services manage to keep their vehicles in functional order all of the time. Is it because there is a resulting loss of revenue when their vehicles are down and the banks and finance houses still have to be paid instalments on the credit financing, and that downtime for them is not permitted?
If that sort of consideration moves the private operator to ensure the availability of their fleet, one wonders whether the Office of Public Sector Reform can infuse a similar approach and accountability into the operations of the public ambulance service.
It bears reflection that a more efficient attitude is exhibited in other parts of the world concerning such services and that there are standard times for the ambulance service to get to calls, and that a failure to respond to a caller and get to his or her rescue within the standard time can trigger legal action for negligence in the High Courts.
Perhaps the brightest spark in this whole story is that the new minister has visited the ambulance department and is aware of the difficulties since he had a close look at the difficulties being experienced.
One hopes that this matter will now receive the kind of attention that it needs and that measures will be put in place to ensure that the ambulances managed and operated by the Public Service are maintained and serviced in a manner sufficiently efficient to reassure the public that in times of emergency the service can respond in a timely fashion. If the service is sick, it can hardly respond to the needs of the sick.
