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Emergency Service numbers still going unanswered

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Dear MyPE

Call centres for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) across the Eastern Cape Province are still almost impossible to reach, either on the 10177 number for landline users, or the 112 number for cell phone users.

Hospital personnel and private individuals from the Nelson Mandela Metro, as well as the Sarah Baartman, Joe Gqabi and Chris Hani districts, have repeatedly complained that they battle to get any assistance on these numbers.

In a recent parliamentary question to the MEC for Health, Sindiswa Gomba, which questioned why these numbers were frequently not answered by the call centres, the MEC replied that the Chief Director of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) continuously conducts assessments of the communication lines at the call centres and reports faults to service providers for immediate attention.

However, she misses the point.

The lines are working, but they are seldom answered. The real issue here is that it is the EMS personnel themselves that have been operating many of the call centres. They are desperately short staffed and underequipped to deal with all the requests for assistance.

I have written to the MEC to request that the decentralisation of EMS services be prioritised, so that turnaround times are dramatically reduced, which will relieve the pressure on the EMS personnel. I have further requested that the call centre personnel be more effectively trained on the importance of answering all calls that come through to them, as lives are at stake.

In the DA-led Western Cape, EMS services are decentralised across the province for quick and effective response to health emergencies. The emergency situation gets assessed over the phone and priority 1 patients (those whose lives are under threat) will have access to an ambulance in 15 minutes or less, more than 80% of the time.

Until the Department of Health addresses the real issue of understaffing of EMS personnel and the shortage of ambulances across all districts, the citizens of this province will continue to be at the mercy of a system that fails them instead of a system that saves their lives.

Regards

Jane Cowley, MPL
DA EC Shadow MEC for Health

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