SCDF engages private ambulance operators
Come 1st June, Singapore will have more ambulances to respond to
emergency calls.
The Singapore Civil Defence Force has engaged two private
operators to provide support to its Emergency Ambulance Service or
EAS.
The Private Ambulance Operators or PAOs will be adding ten more
ambulances to the current EAS fleet of 40.
SCDF says the initiative aims to cater to the rising number of
EAS calls it receives every year.
This increase is attributed to the country's rapidly ageing
population.
SCDF projected that by 2030, the number of EAS calls it receives
will almost double to more than 230,000 annually.
It responded to nearly 120,000 calls last year.
To help cope with this increased demand, the two selected PAOs
-- Unistrong Technology and Lentor Ambulance -- will each be
providing five brand new ambulances and fifteen additional crew
members to the current EAS team.
Each ambulance will be manned by a driver, a medic and a
paramedic.
Jonathan Koh, who's the Chief Operating Officer of Lentor
Ambulance says his company has put aside about half a million
dollars for the five ambulances.
He will also be recruiting more employees to support the EAS
team.
" We have already advertised. We are planning to recruit about
24 people. The driver, the paramedic's assistant, the paramedic.
And most of the paramedics, they've already gone through the
one-year Higher NITEC courses with ITEs and the Civil Defence. In
the tender document, they have specified they will assign at least
five calls per vehicle per day for us. So for five vehicles, we
will have a total of 25 calls."
SCDF's Operations Director, Colonel Anwar Abdullah says the two
PAOs were handpicked from a pool of six companies that submitted
their tenders last December.
The force awarded both of them with a three-year contract and
the companies also have an option to extend it for an additional
two years.
Colonel Anwar assures the public that the PAOs will be just as
capable as the SCDF's EAS team.
"We will be closely monitoring their performance. There are
audit systems which we have already introduced to ensure that the
competencies are all maintained. The paramedics and the other
emergency personnel, they need to pass their competency tests every
six months."
The PAOs will only be operating during the peak periods for
ambulance calls, namely from Monday to Saturday, between 8am and
8pm.
SCDF will be also rolling out a new call-taking framework on the
15th of April to further enhance its current emergency ambulance
service.
The Medical Protocol System or MPS will make use of
computer-aided technology to better process emergency calls.
Under the new initiative, operators will ask callers a set of
pre-approved medical questions pertaining to their chief
complaints.
Colonel Anwar says, this will allow the operators to diagnose
the patients' conditions before the ambulance arrives.
"It helps the operator to derive critical information when we
receive calls from the public. This information will enable our
operators to diagnose the condition of the casualty and at the same
time will relay this information to the paramedics enroute to
attend to the case."
Colonel Anwar says, these questions will not affect the time
taken for an ambulance to be deployed to a scene.
It will still be dispatched within one minute after information
such as the patient's location and contact number have been
ascertained.
The MPS will start its two-week trial run starting tomorrow.
--938Live
