All set to distribute ambulances on January 28 – Health Minister

Health Minister, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, has assured that the parked ambulances at the forecourt of the state house will finally be distributed on January 28, 2020.

He said the president will, on the said date, commission the policy which will begin his vision to improve ambulance services in the country.

“On the 28th of the month the president will commission the entire policy, his vision that he wants to ensure that he is improving on pre-hospital care emergency medicine and I think that is the first step in improving ambulance service,” the minister told Evans Mensah on JoyNews’ ‘PM: express’.

He added that, the name of each constituency has been inscribed on an ambulance and as promised, every constituency will be given one.

“We have brought in 307 ambulances and we have two hundred and something constituencies. Every single one (constituency) will have one.”

He further noted that, to add up to the existing staff of the Ghana Ambulance Service, over 500 people have already been trained to man the ambulances and more are going to be trained to ensure the vehicles are always in operation.

“We have actually recruited a large number, a little over 500 that we have trained some of them are also drivers and we’re still going ahead to actually recruit some more drivers to train such that we can have the full complements of three 8-hour shifts, in a day four of them in all the constituencies.”

EMT officers, he added, have also been trained and posted to the various constituencies to ensure the takeoff of the ambulance services is without hitch.

Reacting to the many criticisms over the ambulances being parked at parliament house for months, the minister said there were few other things to be installed in the vehicles such phone tablets that allows them use GPS to easily locate patients and also tracking devices which would help the command centre easily track the location of each ambulance at any time.

He said there are still more things to be done but those can be done even after the distribution of the vehicles.

“We want to put in some devices that will start doing the PCR in the ambulance before you even get to the hospital… but we are not going to wait for that. We’ll deploy the ambulances and eventually going forward we’ll continue to add more technology,” he noted.