high on its agenda
5 March 2007
The North Health Department has during their annual Strategic Planning
Lekgotla placed Emergency Medical Rescue Services (EMRS) high on its priority
list for the financial year 2007/08. This is a result of a number of concerns
observed within the EMRS in the province during the better part of last year,
especially in the festive season period. The department noticed a high volume
of calls and requests for EMRS during the 2006 festive season. Of particular
concern is that our EMRS personnel have in many occasions responded to 'hoax'
calls or false alarms.
"Our people must be encouraged to behave in a responsible manner. These
vehicles use petrol and even more annoying is the fact that time is wasted
attending to hoax calls while vehicles could have attended to other serious
calls. You can imagine travelling a distance of about 90 km or more only to
arrive at the scene and find out there is no accident. The department is
currently in a process of establishing a call centre with the objective of
assisting us to screen calls and prioritise them accordingly," said MEC Nomonde
Rasmeni
The department highlighted the following among other priorities highlighted
during the recently held Strategic Planning Lekgotla:
* to improve provincial response times
* to improve the management of EMRS vehicles
* to improve the EMRS communication systems within the province
* to ensure human resource capacity development for EMRS
* to develop and implement EMRS referral policy
* to provide an effective medical treatment to all the pre-hospital emergencies
in North West province
* to provide a high quality treatment of patients
* to have appropriately designed EMRS stations
* to ensure that Service Level Agreements are signed with private EMRS
providers.
In terms of strengthening communication systems, the key thing will be to
increase the number of control centres with electronic dispatch. The department
will also look into increasing the percentage of control centres upgraded to 80
and to increase the percentage of communities in the province with access to a
toll free number to 95 during 2007/08. The long term objective is to increase
these targets to 100% by 2009/10.
Another key thing will be to implement a public awareness campaign as a
strategy to mitigate the issue of hoax calls and to ensure public understanding
of EMRS service and how it functions. Emergency Medical and Rescue Services are
one of the major services provided by the health sector. It consumes about R147
million per annum of the health budget. At present the service consists of four
district control centres and 22 stations. The toll free number 10177 is
utilised to obtain an ambulance. The response times have been reduced due the
increase in the number of ambulances and the increase in the training of staff.
Just as a matter of urgency to this matter, the department secured another
batch of 26 new ambulances early in January this year (2007).
Furthermore, the following is analysis of constraints or challenges and
planned interventions to overcome them:
Constraints/challenges:
* shortage of skilled staff
Planned intervention:
* incentives to attract staff
* increase the levels of training
* retention strategy.
Constraints/challenges:
* Poor turnaround time for service and repair of vehicles.
Planned intervention:
* to have tight SLAs with Department of Transport, Roads and Community Safety
and service providers
* provide more ambulances.
Constraints/challenges:
* inadequate compliance with policy
Planned intervention:
* induction training and mentorship.
* monitoring and evaluation.
Constraints/challenges:
* implementation of the decentralized EMRS model
Planned intervention:
* communication and change management strategy
Constraints/challenges:
* inadequate management of EMRS vehicles
Planned intervention:
* installation of tracking devices in vehicles.
The department further developed plans for quality improvement measures and
amongst others looked at the following:
* the employment of more EMRS staff to cover underserved areas
* to ensure tight SLA with all service providers for vehicle maintenance
* continuous in-service training of EMRS staff
* constant monitoring and evaluation of services with quarterly updates
* implementation of mentorship program
* communication and change management strategy
* improved screening and selection entry requirement to EMRS training
courses
The challenge to provide quality services to our people has not been easy as
you all know where we come from, however, together with our people we can
overcome by reporting all EMRS vehicle (ambulances) that are loitering in our
taverns or going around township like a taxi picking up people who are not
patients. The department has also established a call centre which will be
linked to the EMRS number so people can follow up on all the calls that are not
attended.
For enquiries, please contact:
Lesiba Molala
Acting Departmental Spokesperson
Tel: (018) 387 5627
Cell: 082 5521 319
E-mail: Lmolala@nwpg.gov.za
Issued by: Department of Health, North West Provincial Government
5 March 2007
