An ambulance crisis has developed in the ZF Mcgawu district, where only nine out of 22 ambulances are operational.
One ambulance is responding to emergencies in the large Upington area, with a 90 kilometer radius. The other operational ambulance is being used to transport sick patients to and from Kimberley.
Keimoes has one ambulance. While the area is relatively small, it includes a number of islands. Kakamas, which includes the areas of Rietfontein and Askham, also has a single ambulance to respond to callouts. The situation presents a death trap for those in need of life-saving treatment.
Of the district’s three patient transport busses, only one is operational, seriously hampering patient access to the tertiary hospital in Kimberley for specialized treatment. The situation is no better in other districts.
The situation is dire. Even more worrisome is the department’s inability to procure additional ambulances for the current financial year, due to insufficient funds and accruals as well as its failure to improve the output rate for vehicles that are in for repairs.
When the Premier, Dr Zamani Saul, was inaugurated, he committed to cut spending on luxury vehicles for the executive, and to rather procure ambulances. Yet still, at its best, the province operates with between 90 and 95 operational ambulances a day and at its worst, with about sixty. This is not significantly better than the state of the ambulance fleet in 2019, which was reported as operating with between 75 and 85 ambulances a day.
The inefficiencies of the province’s emergency medical service are exposed when considering that the province requires 185 operational ambulances at any given time. This is a target which was decreased to 130 by the sixth administration, to obscure the glaring failings of the health department.
This attests to the department’s ongoing failure to develop and implement a fleet management plan, despite being fully aware of the need for a well-equipped and capacitated emergency fleet to save lives.
The DA has engaged with the provincial health department to urgently attend to the ambulance crisis in ZF Mcgawu. The only sustainable solution to achieving significant improvements in health care, however, is to rescue the ambulance fleet and the health system, from years of mismanagement by a failing ANC government.