The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Northern Cape will request parliamentary intervention to help us address the long turn-around time for repairs of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) vehicles. This is because the longer they sit in garages, the more patients are abandoned at their homes without medical care.
Currently, only 75 out of 150 EMS vehicles in the Northern Cape, including ambulances, patient transporters and emergency vehicles, are operational. This was revealed by MEC of Health, Maruping Lekwene, at a recent legislature committee meeting.
The issue was previously flagged by the Auditor General in the 2022/2023 management report, where an audit on the Namakwa fleet showed that only 42%, or 13 out of 31 ambulances, were operational. The remaining vehicles were found to be spending a considerable amount of downtime in government garages and at repair merchants.
The unavailability of ambulances for the delivery of EMS has a direct impact on health care services delivered to people in a medical emergency and may even result in death.
The DA has raised our concerns regarding the turn-around time for repairs, for years. According to the provincial health department, the situation stems from a National Treasury decision that the entire country’s account must go through Wesbank, even if a vehicle requires something small, like break-pads.
Despite past commitments that the matter is receiving attention, the service level agreement between the department and repair merchants and government garages has not yet been reviewed to shorten the ambulance repair time. This is extremely problematic given the high number of breakdowns and road accidents in the Northern Cape, with its long distances between hospitals and its largely rural road network and poor road conditions.
The DA has referred our concerns to our counterparts at national parliament. We need to ramp up the pressure on Health and Treasury to review the mechanism for the repair of EMS vehicles. No one should be denied hospital care because vehicles await treatment in garages.