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Editorial:Emergency Management Services staffers are walking a fine line

Nie Cele

Nie Cele

Many lives will be lost unless our emergency services’ response time is scrutinised as an emergency itself.

Last year a neighbour lost his life because an ambulance arrived too late. This was despite being assured by the emergency call centre that an ambulance had been dispatched five minutes after the call.

A mother gave birth to a baby boy on the pavement in pouring rain, a few metres from my gate.

Well over an hour after our call, two medics appeared from the ambulance in what seemed to be slow motion. They looked more like a courier service picking up a parcel.

I doubt if these guys are properly trained. I’m told that, internationally, all emergency calls meet the eight minute response time target. Authorities here say we should expect between nine and 12 minutes depending on the circumstances. It has since emerged that there are 350 emergency call centres in the country set up by different organisations, each with a different number.

To make things worse it’s been two years since government promised to set up one national emergency number in a drive to curtail these delays. To date nothing has changed, and all we hear is that the matter is now with the treasury department, which shilly shallies about the budget needed to roll it out.

The biggest question is how long government will delay implementing something you’d think was as easy as ABC. Already some laymen question the dragging feet. There’s even a joke that the delay is planned to increase the mortality rate of the country’s escalating population.

Advice, just get on with rolling out the line and stop reducing peoples’ lives to nothing, finish and klaar.

citybeat@caxton.co.za

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Nie Cele