Ambulances will be digitally managed – Bawumia

Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia says the ambulances which are waiting at the forecourt of the State House for the President to distribute will be managed digitally.

He said government plans to fit electrical gadgets in the vehicles to allow easy management and control.

“On January 6, 2020, the President will hand over the ambulances to 275 constituencies. We will manage the ambulances digitally. So sitting in Accra we will know where which ambulance is going so we can supervise and manage them well,” he said in his address at the delegates conference of the party.

President Akufo-Addo provoked some Ghanaians when he said he has refused to distribute the waiting ambulances because he does not want to b accused of bias.

“The Minister for Special Development Initiative told me some of the ambulances were in and asked if she should distribute them and I said NO; she shouldn’t. She should wait for the others to come in so that we can distribute all at the same time…Fortunately for us all of them will be in by the end of this month and on the 6th of January, I will commission them and the distribution will take place simultaneously and nobody will accuse me of favouritism, and so on. There is no justification on they being parked but if I was to send it here and not here I think you know the kind of discourse that will come,” the President said.

Meanwhile, Pressure group OccupyGhana has backed calls for the ambulances which are sitting idle near Parliament House to be distributed to the various health centres ahead of the rest which are yet to come in.

“In emergency care, the stepwise care of the critically ill or injured goes by algorithms that are known as the “ABCDs.” They are important because following them leads to the saving of lives.

“In establishing an emergency service, that same order is needed to prevent chaos. Ambulances are a very important part of an emergency response service but even more important are the receiving points or what we termed “Command Centres” in our petition to the president a year ago. Once you have that, the pieces that make up an emergency response service are easier to arrange as you get them. If we had a Command Centre, we would have been ready even before the ambulances arrived. Instead, these ambulances are gracing the courtyard of the State House in all their splendour. They have become eye candy for a desolate populace whose voices precipitated a rapid acquisition of these ambulances”.