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Ambulances head in new direction
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TO make better use of increasingly limited resources, emergency and non-emergency ambulance services will be run separately from 2017, Shanghai health officials announced.
Operating under the authority of a special new department, non-medical entities, including taxi services, will take over duties such as ferrying discharged patients back home and taking elderly outpatients in for treatment.
With paramedics in short supply, the population growing and the number of people entering old age increasing, the ambulance service is under increasing strain.
There have been many complaints from people who have been unable to get an ambulance after calling the hotline or have had to wait hours for one to arrive.
Officials from Shanghai Medical Emergency Center said about 40 percent of the “120” calls they receive are for non-emergencies. This prompted them, in 2014, to place patients’ conditions into urgency categories to ensure that the most desperate cases were attended to first.
Under the new scheme, only ambulances providing emergency services will have a paramedic on board, and non-emergency ones will be manned by a nurse or person with first-aid training.
The city will have one ambulance for every 30,000 people and a response time of under 12 minutes by 2020, say officials. To achieve this aim, the city aims to increase the number of paramedics by establishing a new training scheme and professional development program, and set up more ambulance sub-centers.
There is one ambulance for every 40,000 people in the city.
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