THE harrowing personal experiences of accident victims have once again highlighted the island’s woefully ineffective ambulance service.
Poor training, understaffing and unacceptable response times are just two of the serious problems afflicting the island’s ambulance service.
Governments over the years have pledged to upgrade the service, but it is still notoriously inadequate.
Among the most serious problems affecting the service are:
Most ambulances are currently based at urban hospitals, and have no permanent attendants.
Nurses on shift in the emergency room take turns in riding in them when an emergency call comes in.
Drivers are required to have little more than a driver’s licence and a high-school leaving certificate.
Nurses’ training is limited to what they have learned in the four years spent at nursing school.
They do not know how to carry out intubation and only recently have started training on how to use defibrillators.
Various studies and proposals over the years have been ignored and ended up languishing in the drawers of government departments because of budget concerns.
The Sunday Mail has learned that a recent study prepared by the Health Ministry for the Finance Ministry was returned by the latter with a request for more details.
But a recent police study on traffic accidents assessed that every life lost on the road costs the state between £250,000 and £300,000 – the money spent educating a person, and lost in future productivity, etc.
Thus, saving 10 lives from 100 or so killed in road accidents every year would save the state around £3 million.
On February 9, 2000, seven people were killed in Troodos after their minibus slammed into a concrete barrier.
Then Health Minister Frixos Savvides noted that it took “24 minutes after the call” for the first ambulance to arrive from Kyperounda village hospital.
The next ambulances, which had to come from Limassol, took 40 minutes to get there, Savvides added.
In the wake of the accident, authorities admitted it was vital to upgrade the ambulance service.
That was four years ago. The only thing done has been occasional renewal of the ambulance fleet.
Not a single cent has been spent on training paramedics or creating a central dispatch centre to co-ordinate rescue services.
Not even the simple step of dispersing ambulances around town to cut response times was ever implemented.
Meanwhile, people keep dying, especially in traffic accidents, due to lack of training and belated response to the scene.
The inadequacy, ineffectiveness, and often unprofessional behaviour of ambulance crews is better described by the personal experiences of accident victims.
In one such case a woman involved in a motorway accident earlier this month told the Sunday Mail how television crews arrived on the scene before the ambulance, which, she claimed, took 35 minutes.
This, however, was denied by the ambulance service director Andreas Kouppis, who said the hospital’s logs indicated that the call on Sunday, January 4, had been received at 3.15pm and the ambulance had been on the scene by 3.30pm.
By 4pm, the woman was delivered to the hospital, Kouppis added.
The accident happened near Moni in Limassol, when Soulla Messiou lost control of her vehicle after blowing a tyre, hitting another car before overturning three times and ending up in a ditch belly-up.
“I didn’t lose consciousness at all; the first people on the scene were the TV crews.
“The fire service arrived just after them,” Messiou said.
In the absence of an ambulance, firemen, fearing her car could blow up, were trying to get her out as fast as they could.
She said they were pulling her by the her legs, but a trainee doctor who had stopped at the scene intervened and stopped them immediately.
It later transpired that she had sustained a light spinal injury from the accident.
“He took my pulse and tried to make me relax,” Messiou said.
The ambulance finally arrived and she was removed from the car and put in the ambulance.
The nurse placed a collar on her neck once she was inside the ambulance, not on the scene, Messiou said.
On the way to hospital, the stretcher kept hitting the side of the ambulance every time it went round one of Limassol’s many roundabouts.
In a separate motorway accident, early in January, the emergency services used the same ambulance to carry an injured man and his dead wife to hospital.
A relative told the Sunday Mail that the force of the collision was such that the woman’s face was unrecognisable.
The family was furious that a second ambulance had not been dispatched to the scene, and the crew were even censured by a police officer for putting the dead wife together with the husband, who was blaming himself for her death.
“It is common sense,” the relative told the Sunday Mail.
